La Sorcière de la Bastille
by Isofaux
Summary: "If any man ever tried to touch me, I would sooner tear the iron bars off this window and throw myself to the stones below...Let the Parisians speak of me then! I'd rather die at my own choosing than die an old crone here." A jailer encounters a strange woman in the walls of the Bastille, past sexual libertines and a lovesick Assassin. ACU.
1. L'affaire du geôlier

_If I were a superstitious woman I would think of myself as a plague wind that blows death warmly, with affection, like the breath of a whisper. - **Anne Boleyn, 'The Other Boleyn Girl'.**_

* * *

_**June, 1789**_

They had said she had driven a man so mad he self immolated. Another had said he'd been so moved by her charisma he could not bear to part with her person. One more had said that she stood bemused at the spectacle, with a smile that chilled the air around her while the man writhed and burned, flesh peeling and breeches smoking in his dance of death through the sparse Parisian streets; how her laugh, mirthful and bewitching, woke the dead from their chains and drove the living into theirs.

_Sorcière _was what the _citoyens_ _et_ _citoyennes_ called her. A term seldom used in this supposed age of Enlightenment. Yet the incident was severe enough to warrant the insult, the label – and the truth of it had been clouded by rumour and whispers. No one and yet everyone wanted to speak about it: the _étrangerère_ who bent to pick up a loose pamphlet from a playwright, hand extended, pleasantries on her lips, and accursed the man to that horrid death.

It was not the marshals who had brought her to the prison, but two members of the _maréchaussé. _She had been intended for _La Grand Force_, but someone had vouched for her. So it was that she was delivered in the early hours of June 2nd, 1789, to the uppermost stories of the Bastille.

So it was that Thomas, _le fossoyeur_ and former _garde français, _would be the first to see her.

He'd served 15 years in his regiment, served a stint with the Swiss Guard and then played guard duty at Versailles when Madame du Barry was the lecher of court. His father had served in Fontenoy until a grapeshot took his leg and he was left a cripple. Two of Thomas' brothers died of the flux, and his mother passed from a fever when he was young. He was unmarried, had no children, and considered himself too old and too displeasing to the eye to be marriageable. His father, Pierre the Elder, stayed at the _Hôtel des Invalides_, and it was Thomas' obedience to the last dregs of his family's name to pay for his care.

He'd chosen guard duty at the Bastille when the pay did not put enough food on the table. It was an understatement that no one in France had enough money for anything. The country was flat broke, in debt, most of her population rural, illiterate and manic from hunger._ La Belle France_ lagged behind her rivals in terms of scientific and military prowess, and it showed when Britain drove her to bankruptcy despite her losses (and France's quasi-victory) in America.

Bernard-René Jourdan de Launay, the governor of the Bastille, had taken his application papers with a raised eyebrow and fidgeting fingers. They resembled earthworms on his high forehead, the brown clashing with his powdered wig. The purse of his lips left a small hole in the middle of his mouth, the wrinkles turning this way and that as his mind processed information. _Le Gouverner_, so used to mundane events and boredom at this infamous prison, was skeptical of Thomas: how he slouched instead of standing straight, how his breeches were loose and strings were tied around his knees, how an eye twitched here and there at certain questions, as if the dust floating around his head irritated his sensibilities.

"No surname?" de Launay had asked, twirling the quill around in his fingers. His nails were recently filed and cleaned, unlike his own.

"Non, monsieur. I left that behind me when my family's named was blackened with dishonour."

There the eyebrows went up. More papers were flipped, more movements of mumbling lips. At last, they settled on the escritoire. "_Je comprends." _Not the best candidate he'd seen was what he wanted to say. But personnel was lacking and he needed more men. De Launay could not complain nor could he find the resources to complain to begin with. "You will be assigned the night shift. Honour the prisoners' requests when you can, even if they are..._ridicule._"

Clearly, he had been referring to the Marquis de Sade, the sexual libertine who'd spent his time trying on his elaborate wardrobe and asking Thomas advice on how to pitch his 'libertine' novels. Thomas knew de Sade on paper and from public perception before then, but never personally.

Now that he knew de Sade _personally..._Best to be professional.

"And if I can't?" Thomas had asked, steering back to the present.

"Tell them _un mensonge_. One more won't hurt them. It might make them sing their innocence even more."

A done deal. Mundane. Traditional. Thomas l_e fossoyeur_ didn't expect that duty to involve a sexual libertine's pornographic novel-to-be ('You can read,' he was teased, 'so come on and give me a taste of your thoughts! You're not_ that_ much of a prude.'), or paper and an ink well for the _métis Autrichien_. That insult did not come from Thomas himself, but from his fellow guards who'd picked up on the prisoner's heritage and promptly used it to bicker among themselves.

Astute Frenchmen, forever perfect yet imperfect. The chance to set upon someone who had a mark blacker than themselves was too good to miss, and considering the standing of Austrians in the French psyche, it was the best morsel they'd seen in years.

The prisoner heard about it soon enough, as insults and secrets never languished long in the Bastille, and retorted with a degree of sass Thomas had to admit was brilliant. Something to do with them being 'not good enough to serve in the army, but perfect for babysitting each other at night.' Among other more inflammatory barbs, _bien sûr. _How his comrades had turned redder than a Comtesses' rouge! Ah, he could breach his pay for all the breeches ruined from his muffled laughter.

The Bastille shift was, for the most part, quiet. Quiet bar the snickering of de Sade and the _clack clack _of the two prisoners that sparred from morning to evening. His shift was over by then, but Thomas would watch them spar for about ten minutes, maybe more if he wasn't bogged down by exhaustion or determined to visit his father. He'd take his daily impression of the two – fascinating, and terrific fighters they were – and leave before returning in the evening when they were finishing up their session. Maybe the larger one would ask him for something other than 'piss water'. His companion, the _métis Autrichien, _would ask him if he received any letters.

For about two weeks Thomas shook his head no. Watched the disappointment on the young man's face. Heard the cackles from de Sade as he toyed with the other guards.

Mundane. Traditional. Oh so boring. Disappointments feted by the leers of a naked man in the cell over. A constant stream of 'Pisspot' and grunts from sparring.

The morning of June 2nd had started off the same. The fencers woke up for their early morning session, the guards grumbled that it was too early (or too late) to have breakfast, and de Launay was somewhere, reading papers.

By 5 a.m., at the end of his shift, a _maréchaussé _was screaming down the stone halls, a long echo that rattled the mist off the stones. From the courtyard was a high pitched and rolling shriek like that of a sheep facing down the shear, increasing in pitch as the man struggled.

"_The bitch took my finger! Get her off me!"_

There was more yelling, and among the masculine throng of grunts and pained whimpering was a low-pitched growl that did not belong to persons of genteel birth. Thomas made his way to the main courtyard where all the feudal towers pressed in on one another like looming, dreaded birthday candles. There were four men, two _garde__s__ français__es _like him, the cook, and the _hussar _who had delivered the prisoner. All four were struggling against the new arrival, who kicked and scratched at any bare skin that approached.

The _mar__é__chauss__é _with the missing finger – the ring finger, Thomas noticed - pointed at the struggling mass.

"_Don't ever take that sack off her head! She'll use her teeth on your cheek!"_

Thomas approached the wounded man. The blood from the gnawed appendage was darker than the red collar around his neck and gleamed in the early morning light. It blended into the dark blue of the King's issued uniform for the _garde, _staining what Thomas thought was freshly laundered clothes. The man's lips trembled from anger and from slight. His wig was on the ground, dirtied from stomping boots.

Thomas pulled a clean kerchief from his waistcoat pocket and gave it to the man. He earned a 'Merci' and no more.

The grunts, low and now distinctly feminine, were the only sounds in the mid-morning ensemble that were octaves over the pants and whooshing breaths of the men. In the break, Thomas managed to sneak a glance at the new arrival.

The décolletage of the white nightgown was an easy giveaway, albeit with the woman's bone-thin frame he was surprised the garment even stayed on her. Thomas couldn't assess how tall she was, how much she really weighed, or measure the bruises on her skin before another sack was thrown around her feet and tied with jute string the _hussar_ had provided.

The sack over the woman's head then fell to her waist, covering her wrists and arms with the new addition coming up to her knees. Tied as she was, she still fought, swinging her head left to right, angry cries muffled by the brown cotton around her mouth. The _hussar _and the cook panted at the exertion.

"_Mon Dieu, I don't think I've ever had so much trouble with such a weak woman."_ The cook shook his head. "_A banshee. And they call this one the witch."_

Thomas went to her left flank, opposite the cook. He looked at him. "_How about it, Henri?"_

The cook huffed. "_You're going to have to pay me more if you want me to get close to her."_

As if to offer their stay of executions, the _hussar_ and the _garde _backed away. The former went back to his carriage, no doubt eager to pick up more pliant prisoners, and the latter needed to go to the infirmary over his missing finger. So, Thomas took the initiative. He picked up the woman from under her arms, while the cook, Henri, grabbed her legs. His apron, once snuffed with the few bags of flour they had, was torn from the hem, the scratches evident on the white cloth that trembled with his exertion.

"_Hold her as you would a goat. She'll still be able to kick you." _

"_You're telling me, Thomas."_

That was Thomas' introduction to the s_orci__è__re__, _an unnamed, indescribable thing that bit off a _garde __français__e's _finger as if it had been a stick of candy. Thomas had not had the time or the opportunity to ask why the woman had bitten off the appendage, but he figured that with wine – copious amounts from de Sade's trunk, filched of course – he'd be swearing up and down the table about the encounter.

Said indescribable thing had gone quiet as Thomas and Henri the cook made their way through the courtyard and into the prison proper. Thomas felt her sag in his arms, her head finding a perch between his neck and shoulder. He could hear her breathing: shallow and quick paced but not weak. It was the paced breath of a seething, caged animal, displeased that they should be caught and prepared to use teeth and claws when they found vulnerable flesh. Through the sack it sounded like a deer felled by rifle shot that still thrashed with the will to fight. No doubt that if both sacks were removed someone would be tumbling down the steps of the Bastille.

Henri adjusted the woman's legs in his arms. Thomas watched him as he did so, making sure the s_orci__è__re'__s _knees didn't snap and a foot went into Henri's nose. He was one of the better cooks, and stayed only because of the things Thomas pilfered for him from the other prisoners. It would be a shame to lose him. They couldn't afford any other cook, and Henri was diligent in making good food from the materials proffered him. He was limited in his endeavour, but Henri did not have many complaining prisoners. For that, de Launay kept him on.

Henri exhaled out the side of his mouth. _"She was supposed to go to Bazini__è__re Tower. Now she's going to the calottes."_

Thomas huffed, adjusting the woman's weight. She was not heavy, but as the fight left her she became dead weight. He thought he could hear a sad sigh beneath her cloth bindings.

"_Under the roof?"_

"_It's __June__. All the other prisoners complain about the heat. We won't keep her up there all night, unless she starts a small riot. She'll be moved to the lower levels once she's calmed down."_

Thomas nodded. They were making their way past the cells, where the fencers were engaging in their play-fighting.

_Clack. Clack clack clack. **Smack.**_

"_Aie!"_

"_What'd I'll tell you, Pisspot? Pay attention."_

Henri quickened his pace. For a moment Thomas wondered why, until the sack moved against his shoulder. He could almost _feel _the woman's rapid blinking, see the thoughts racing through in her mind. When Thomas looked back up, Henri was shaking his head, his lips in a thin line.

'Keep her quiet,' that look said. He didn't want a riot to start over a strange woman. De Launay would lose his mind, his breeches and then his head in that order. They all would.

Thomas leaned his head near the nape of the woman's neck.. His stubble felt rough against her smooth skin. "_Don't scream," _he whispered. "_Please don't make this harder than it has to be."_

Thomas thought – though it could have been the sigh from the violinist, playing in a chair in the cell to their right, or the pants from the fencers or the huffs from Henri – that he heard a small, defeated moan. A slight tilting of the woman's head, the fabric slipping further down her chest, was the sign that she understood.

_Clack. Clack clack clack **smack.**_

"_Pisspot, do I have to repeat myself? Don't let your guard down for a second - "_

"_Who is **that?"**_

The mutual sigh of relief Henri and Thomas were about to share was dashed like the coffers under _Madame Deficit_. The _métis Autrichien _had noticed their new companion, peering out from his cell at the limp form in their arms. He watched them with inquisitive eyes, sure to ask questions later in the night when Thomas returned. When he made it to the bars of his cage to examine further, to see the ripples of the décolletage against the woman's chest (the white was what caught his attention; that one had an eye for colours), Thomas and Henri were already moving around the corner.

There was a light smack from a hand on a shoulder. "_Where are they taking that one?"_

A bark of laughter. Whole conversations could float through the Bastille, no matter how high up you went in the towers. "_Hell no, Pisspot. What do you think that is?"_

"_There is no shortage of cells down __**here. **__Not as if we can't do with more company.__"_

"_That's because that's not a man, __Pisspot.__"_

It was a shame the ensemble couldn't see the young man's face: the 'O' of his mouth giving way to a quick frown and eyebrows bunched together in thought. "_They allow women here? In the Bastille?"_

"_If you remember the Diamond Necklace Affair, ye__s__, women can be prisoners."_

"_But why isn't she kept -"_

"_Pisspot. Just because this prison isn't full doesn't mean the men here are celibate. They'd kill for five minutes with __a woman, more so if she's a pretty one__. And that – " _He had jutted his chin in their direction - "_That one just took a man's finger."_

* * *

'A family of dishonest blonds' was where Thomas had came from. Leftovers from the Norman invasion, they'd settled in Normandy before moving to Paris proper when William the Conqueror was finished with England. Thomas, his two brothers Eliot and Eugène and Pierre the Elder had been a decent family. They had a surname, even a 'de' at one point. When both brothers abandoned their posts at the army, catching flux from improperly boiled water and thereby infecting their entire regiment the family suffered a terrible dishonor. Only demure and obedient Thomas who served his army with all the nationalist pomp managed to salvage a meagre living from his family's tarnished reputation.

Thomas knew he would not sire a family. Even if he could court, the ruined name was unworthy of marriage even to the lowest of milkmaids. His physical appearance was lacking as well. His face was too square, resembling a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven, with muddy eyes and too thin lips above a tucked in chin with stubble both too coarse and too fine. His hair, once a dirty blonde, fit the 'dirty' description as it was crawling with lice half the time. Twice he'd sheared his locks, thrice the lice came back. He nearly gave up until he invested in a lice comb and tea tree oil from a washerwoman_. _

So far, it had worked. He'd had fewer nits in his hair than most noblewomen. Most Parisians. It did not mitigate the grease or the grime or the lye from working as a _fossoyeur,_a profession he thought would make the other guards turn up their noses at him. They'd regarded him with a quiet respect, instead. Not many ordinary men could bury so many dead, and with life expectancy so low from poor harvests and poor living conditions, anyone who could look upon the faces of the dead day by day deserved a modicum of silence.

Thomas was surprised _la __s__orci__è__re _had been delivered so quickly. Under all other circumstances she'd have been beaten to death, that glorious ghost-like skin of hers purpled so dark it'd resemble passing night clouds. The playwright who'd self-immolated had reportedly been a fan-favourite; a voice for the people, a critic of the _Ancien R__é__gime. _Weren't they all?

It'd taken two hours to get her settled into the _calotte _above the _Bazini__è__re _tower. It was sparsely furnished, with a blanket at one end and even a few cushions that had been donated by Henri's sister. The rain and moisture had sucked the colour out of them: once a jovial yellow, they were now an ugly mustard. The _calotte _quarters, next to the dungeons, were the most unpleasant rooms because of their open access to the elements. Because it was June, it was pleasant up here; in fact the breeze from the window was refreshing, bar the ever present stench of sewage and Parisian filth.

There was an escritoire missing a leg. A few chairs with moth-eaten waistcoats thrown over them. The scabbard of a sword, peeled and rotten. There was even a looking glass placed in the far corner, so stained and cracked it resembled a faux diamond. The floors were as clean as they could be, considering that so few prisoners were ever brought up here and vermin preferred the warm confines of the lower levels.

The woman would need to have a cot brought in. If not that, a few more cushions and clean blankets so she would not have to sleep on the floor. Thomas could get some from a seamstress he knew who donated old clothing and materials to the needy. He could pilfer more cushions from de Sade's closets, provided the woman did not mind the scent of rose water and other scents that hovered over Versailles residents like flowery thunderclouds.

Henri watched the woman as she felt the moist stones beneath her, thin white fingers sticking out like spider's legs in search for her missing fly. Her nightgown fell further down her chest, revealing a boney v-neck and protruding ribs. She looked thinner than street urchins who skipped meals to feed their siblings. The sacks were still on her head and legs. Thomas glanced at him, cautious and curious at the same time.

"_Should we take them off?"_

"_Do you want to lose a finger, too?"_

Thomas frowned. "_She'll need water. She's probably thirsty."_

"_You go get her some water, then. I'm not touching her. I need my hands to cook." _

"_Tr__è__s bien. I'll do it." _

The sacked head twisted in his direction like a stag hearing the crack of a twig in a silent winter wood as Thomas followed Henri out of the cell. Thomas spotted wild tendrils sticking out from beneath the sack, threaded twigs like the white ones roaming across the stone floors. He made a mental note to fetch another lice comb.

Neither Thomas or Henri heard as he shut the cell door the witch break out into a soft, tearful whimper.

* * *

_La Sorcière de la Bastille. _How fast the title swept through the prison and into the streets; it had spread faster than a plague wind. The immolated playwright – the now identified Luc Comtois – was spun into tales of passion, deception, courtship and murder. There had been few witnesses to the actual crime, but Parisians all around the Porte Saint-Antoine spoke about the crime as if it was a new Affair of the Poisons.

If Jeanne de Valois could occupy such a place in the prison and weave her way through drastic political scandals, why couldn't this one? The added intrigue was that no one aside from Comtois knew what the witch had looked like. Only the pallor of her skin was known: smooth, white and ghost-like, crept along the Seine like its evening fog. No one knew her personality, her wiles, her wit or where she came from. Like the hailstorm of yesteryear where large blocks of ice fell from the sky it was a sudden, bizarre appearance yet destructive all the same.

So, when Thomas returned that afternoon, with a sack full of laundered clothes, small cushions, and tins of water for the imprisoned woman, he was again confronted with a raucous scene: two more _geôliers _standing in front of a locked cell, one with blood dripping from his nose.

One of the _geôliers _twirled something between his fingers. When Thomas moved closer, he saw that it was a ring, an exquisite one with a white-gold band and a set of diamonds in a snowflake cut. In the poor light it shimmered as if outraged from being separated from its owner. It tumbled between the _geôlier's _gloved fingers, making his epaulettes and helmet look like pewter in comparison to its brilliance. The disgust on the man's face from the presence of this beautiful thing was evident.

Thomas did not have time to ask where the ring came from, as there was a series of knocks, then pounding, at the cell door.

"_My ring! Give me back my ring! That is not yours to keep!"_

Thomas blinked. The low, animalistic growls he'd heard that morning was replaced with a svelte, deliciously feminine voice sparked with ire. As the pounding increased in tempo, so did her voice: it went from a small, controlled timbre to one that tickled Thomas' chest with its anger. Was this from the same woman who burned a man alive and tore off another man's finger?

"_That was my grandmother's bride price! It is worth more than you __will __ever know!" _Her fists banged against her cell door, the hinges tat-a-tatting with the force.

"_You got that right," _the _ge__ô__lier _muttered, eyeing the wood. "_I can buy an entire month's worth of food with this._"

The witch (what good hearing she had!), upon catching that statement, threw her weight against the door. The fight Thomas had glimpsed at the courtyard was back. He could see the hinges rattle from her meagre weight.

"_**You son of a bitch!** If you sell my ring, I'll never forget it!" _Thump. **Crack. **_"No one will ever find your grave when I get to you!"_

The _ge__ô__lier _rolled his eyes. _"Tough words for a weak woman." _He then noticed Thomas.

"_Guard duty for you, eh? Isn't your shift over?"_

"_Oui, but I didn't think it was right to leave her without comfort."_

Both of the gaolers laughed, the plume on their helmets sashaying with their movements. The one on the left had a blackened front tooth. "_Good luck. And it's a shame she's so thin. Those breasts of hers..." _He motioned to his chest. "_...succulente. With a little meat on her bones she'd be quite the looker."_

Thomas blinked. "_Wait. You've seen her without the sack?"_

"_Non,_" said the one on the right. _"We only saw her chest and waist. We wanted to see if she was an old crone, so we came up here."_

Thomas had to shake his head. His eyes burned from sleeplessness, but until now he hadn't paid much attention to it. Everyone had been thrown askew from the new arrival, and already she was being appraised like she was a Louis d'Or. That would make its way up the Seine once the _ge__ô__lier__s _retired for the day. Thomas himself only felt the woman's bony flesh, and here these men were dreaming of appraising and fondling her once she was taken care of. He supposed it was normal since they hadn't had a female prisoner since Jeanne de Valois. But she had been old, and a trickster passing herself off as an aristocrat. She could not be touched. This one, though...she was fair game. She was fair game and no one knew who and what she was.

Perhaps that was part of the intrigue. The fact that she drove a man to douse himself in oil and run screaming down courtyards in the middle of a mild June night was a smudge on an otherwise clouded reputation.

The _ge__ô__lier__s _moved to make way for Thomas. They hovered around him, watching him place the key in the lock.

He sighed. _"Are you two really going to stay here?"_

Both shrugged. Their plumes intermingled at the proximity, and Thomas was tempted to sneeze. He did not wear the plumed helmet like his fellow guards, and he felt that the waistcoat and white breeches were too decent even for an ex-military man. The leather cost too much to clean, the clothes too much to launder and re-dye. Not to mention feathers tickled his nose in a myriad of unpleasant ways.

He twitched his nose, willing away the sneeze. As he was about to turn the key, a thought came to him.

"_Which one of you has the ring?"_

"_Moi." _The one on his right, the one with – Thomas just noticed – a lazy eye. _"What do you want it for?"_

Thomas bit his tongue. He really, _really_ did not want to do this. This was his pay advancement. He hadn't come across money like this, not in years. But the pitch of the woman's cries had gnawed through his chest like a mole through dirt. That ring was not merely a source of wealth; it was not merely a trinket. It held sentimental value, the memory of a family.

Why did he care? If you asked him, Thomas could not tell you. If it was for anyone else, Thomas would have shrugged and allowed the pilfering guards to keep as they pleased; God knew he kept quiet when they stole bread and cheese from the well-to-do prisoners or whistled baldy songs when they grunted with themselves at de Sade's 'interesting' literature.

A domino had been tipped over. There was a vibration in the air, not from heat or excitement, but an unexplained plucking at the strings of his being, telling – nay- _commanding_ him to do this. He was the violin, and the _étrangerère_ was La Folia playing through him.

He plucked a Louis D'or from his pocket. The lazy-eyed guard eyed it, the gold shinier than the diamond in his fingers.

"_Ici. This will pay for your food." _Thomas flipped the coin in the air, and the lazy-eyed guard caught it. He held out his hand for the diamond. "_The ring, s'il vous pla__ît.__"_

There was a moment when the guard, transfixed by the diamond setting, did not want to give it up. Thomas watched as the light glittered in the iris of the guard's good eye, the familiar hunger of greed and fascination present as a bloody scar. The other, the one with the black tooth and nose crusted with browned blood, shared a look with his friend.

"_Nom de Dieu, just hand it over already. I'm tired and I need to piss," _the black-toothed one said.

Lazy-Eye sighed, reluctant, before the gold subsumed his attention. _"Whatever."_

_Dieu Merci. _They were off to the lower levels, no doubt to harass the _métis Autrichien. _Tired as he was, Thomas wanted to see the woman as herself: no sacks around her head, no nails clawing at other's faces. With her ring, he could use it as a peace offering to get her to talk since she hadn't spoken until the guards had provoked her into her tangent.

He did not forget that lull in her ire, that lovely, feminine touch to her voice that was surreal in the Bastille. It sounded youthful, willful and strong, yet tempered with a darker emotion. Was it disappointment? Fear? Hopelessness?

Thomas would have to hope for the best, as the creak of the hinges gave way to the whistle of the wind, revealing the witch who stood in the centre of her new home.

* * *

**_Notes_**

_**My French is abominable. I used to speak it, but since I haven't spoken it in years my memory of it is completely shot. The translations are from my dictionary, as well as the few phrases I remember. Most of the words are recognizable to English speakers. The italics represents them speaking in French. **_

_**\- **__fossoyeur - gravedigger _

\- _étrangerère - Outsider_

\- _métis Autrichien - Austrian half-breed. I don't actually hate Arno (far from it!) but considering he's Franco-Austrian I figured playing into that would add a layer of intrigue. _

_\- _ _maréchaussé - Marshal_

\- _Sorcière - witch_

_\- mensonge - lie_


	2. La Belle Noire

**_I've decided to write the text normally with a few French phrases here and there. Sorry for the inconvenience. _**

* * *

If Thomas could find the best way to describe the sight before him, he would say the closest thing to it was the personification of a black cat.

_La Sorcière _had, predictably, thrown off the sack on her head and cut the jute string around her legs. Both were crumpled by her feet, the riding boots scuffed from being dragged across stone streets to her stone prison. Her nightgown was loose around her shoulders, and sure enough he could see the mounds of her breasts peeking through the tattered fabric. From her condition, Thomas could not find it within himself to be attracted at the sight of them – they looked drained like the rest of her. Skin once supple and firm was stretched tight over elbows, forearms and cheeks. Her wrists were bony, her sternum sharp in its protrusion. She looked as if she had skipped meals for days, maybe weeks, over time. _Poissardes _were larger and thicker in muscle than her, and they were none too picky about refuse from the fish they skinned.

Despite her deplorable state, Thomas would be lying if he did not say she was beautiful.

This was not Jeanne de Valois. But the trickster part was evident. She was young, likely fresh into her twenties, and tall. Thomas, who in his military service was required to be taller than 5'7 and no shorter than 5'6, was shorter than her. With heels, she'd be over six feet tall, and would make many in the French army gawk at her height.

The tendrils he saw peeking from under her former cloth restraints were part of a head full of long, waist-length black hair, an inky mass that set off the whiteness of her skin. This came from the scalp of an oval-shaped face, adorned with pink lips and full bottom lip. To complete the feline ensemble, a pair of shockingly green eyes eyed him with intelligence and caution from the middle of the room.

The woman would need more than a lice comb. Hair as long as hers would be a burden. She'd need to cut it, and smuggling scissors into the Bastille was seen as a violation. In the hands of a volatile creature as her, who wasn't afraid to bite off appendages and break noses, she could easily take out most of the guards in the prison. She could be sneaky enough. Though if she got to the lower levels and encountered the _métis Autrichien _and his teacher she'd be easily subdued.

That reminded Thomas: the young man – the youngest one in the prison – who'd been put there for the murder of a noble (to which he'd insisted he did _not_ do, could he please see someone, this was a mistake, etc) had been drawn to her. If he had seen her as Thomas was seeing her, that could pose a very..._intricate_ problem. Or maybe he didn't have to worry; the young man was always asking him about letters from an Élise. Crisis averted. The ones with sweethearts usually were compliant. They hardly ever thought about being with another woman, even when ones such as l_a Sorcière _were dangled in front of them.

He approached her slowly, setting the sack down and taking the items out one by one. He showed her the metal canteen, swished it to let her know it was water. Her eyes examined it from afar, but she did not move towards him. She continued to watch him as he took out cushions, clean blankets, and even a few clean chemises. All of them were made from scraps of clothing, many 'burrowed' from the nobles who tossed them away after one use. The seamstress near Porte Saint-Antoine was eager to help Thomas once she heard the witch had been moved there. The story had excited her. As an extra reward, she packed a few scraps of warm bread, even – and Thomas was shocked to discover this – caramel candies.

He laid them all out in a row in an easy view for her. He did it to show he did not poison any of the offerings; that the water was not spoiled and was clear as it could be. The bread did not have mould, the cheese free from mites.

Still, the witch did not move. But her eyes did.

"You have my ring."

Thomas looked up at her, hearing the lyrical note to her French. She was not Parisian, that was clear. There was the slightest hint of an accent, but Thomas could not pinpoint it. The Wallonians and the Belgians spoke their French in a Germanic twang; the Creoles had the Caribbean in theirs. The French up and down the country all had their dialects, Thomas knowing most from his military service, but he could not pinpoint this one.

He examined her features closely for a clue to her origins. The lips were plump and expressive, the nose straight but not too prominent, the eyes deep set and cat-like. Features not too crisp like a Frenchwoman's, soft yet sharp around the edges of her jawline...Slavic, perhaps?

That would add to the mystery, wouldn't it? It was worth a try. "_Tu es Russe_? (You are Russian?)"

An eyebrow, plucked and defined, went up. "And how would you know that_?"_

"_I_t was a guess._" _Thomas shrugged. "You don't have to answer._"_

"You're half right,_" _the woman said.

"What am I half right on?_" _Thomas replied, smiling at his own joke.

"_Oui. Je suis Russe. (Yes, I am Russian.) _But only half," she stressed. "That's all you are getting."

"It's better than nothing."Thomas eyed the canteen, standing on the floor next to the blanket. He nodded towards it. "It's safe. I boiled it."

Thomas watched as she moved towards the canteen with all the grace and measured steps of a deer walking through brush. Her fingers, crusted with dirt and grime and blood under the nails, curled around the lid as she twisted it off. Her dried lips relished in the liquid, and he saw her cheeks puff out, swirling the liquid around before she swallowed. An eyebrow went up again.

"_C'est vrai (It's true)..._it_ **is** _safe. But I'll know in a few hours, won't I?"

"I had two brothers die of the flux. I know the effects of bad water."

"_Ah?" _She frowned. The edges of her lips turned downward as she did so, almost giving the look of a pout. The other 'almost' was a look of disapproval. "_Malheureux (Unfortunate)_. But I suppose that gives me more reason to trust you."

"It should,"Thomas said. _"_I don't want to make this experience any worse for you."

"I don't think that's possible,_" _she suddenly spat. A thundercloud of emotion rolled across her face and eyes, intoxicating and destructive in its allure. Thomas hoped that whatever was thundering in her head would not be directed at him. Despite her stature and thin size there was an unkempt fury buried in her depths. He'd seen similar emotions buried before: in his brothers as they begged their superiors not to condemn them to death; in his father as he wished his mind would break and he'd forget all the misfortune that fell upon his sons while agonizing in his bed at the _Hôtel des Invalides._

He had seen it on everyday Parisians, as the food stores closed and the grain began to wilt in the fields from the frost. How they were turned away, hour after hour, for rations that dried up days, weeks, months ago.

It was a fury from injustice. He saw it cross her face, but it was also a controlled, tamed fury, if the two words could be strung together. No doubt the fury had to do with the way her type was seen in France: a Russian, a barbarian and now an enemy of the state could be identified with the point of a finger and a keen eye.

Or perhaps there was another reason. She hadn't reacted as strongly as he thought she would to her being Russian (half, she'd stressed). It was a nonchalant, 'meh, who cares?' response. A better clue was in the way she reacted to her surroundings, how she observed the stone walls and the single barred window to the courtyard hundreds of feet below. How her nose twitched at the air that whistled from the roof, picking up the stench of Paris, of Versailles, and of France. How her reaction had gone from that of a fighting animal to one tranquilized from a hidden trauma; the phantom of fear and hopelessness passing quicker than the flash from a firework.

There was an uneasy silence. Thomas was careful. He had to make amends on the one hand, and ask questions the next. It would not be an easy interrogation. De Launay would want him to write a report and keep an eye on the prisoner because he was the sole volunteer. No one wanted to approach the witch but they were willing to appraise her like a freshly bought mare. Thomas was one who had to take the bullet and put truth to paper.

He fumbled into his pocket, producing the ring which had a door nearly knocked down for it. Her head snapped in its direction. She approached him with silent feet, waiting for him to toss it out the window and hear her scream of despair. When he placed it, gently, in her open palm, it took her a moment to process it.

She looked at him with confusion. "Why did you give it back? Your brothers-in-arms would have cheated you for it."

"You said it was your grandmother's bride price. Too many people sell heirlooms for less. It breaks their heart to do so. It's the least I could do."

She scrutinized him further with her emerald-like gaze as if the answer wasn't enough; as if his presence was a trap she had yet to spring."You are too kind for a prison guard,"she said evenly.

The question, 'What do I owe in return?' went unsaid, but Thomas knew she was going to ask it. When Jeanne de Valois was a prisoner in the Bastille, she would routinely bribe and swindle her way out of situations, and when debts had to be owed, they were _owed. _2,000,000 livres for a diamond necklace that couldn't be paid back in coin had to be paid back in other ways. Jeanne was getting on in years. L_a Sorci__è__re..._again it came back to being the single female prisoner in a nearly empty prison, surrounded by male prisoners and guards.

What did she owe? A fire danced behind her eyes. _Nothing, _it said. _Nothing. _

Thomas felt a knot grow in his throat. He had not met a prisoner who evoked these reactions before, and he had seen terrible attributes in his fellow Frenchmen both on and off the front: how brothers-in-arms were starved and cheated for food because of a favourite superior; how a favourite superior would refuse to send his men to butchery and be butchered in return for his presumed cowardice. In peacetime, it was despicable seeing bloody grudges still. But he kept the feelings down, swallowed them like bad soup.

This? This had to be mitigated. Promptly. Thomas raised his hands, palms out. "I am not that kind of man. I am not going to abuse you in that way,_" _he started. "I won't touch you, I swear. I'll make sure no one else - "

"Oh, you don't have to worry," the Russian said, cool and crisp like a hot blade in snow. "Because if any man ever tried to touch me, I would sooner tear the iron bars off this window and throw myself to the stones below."She pointed to her lone opening to the world as if it had been on her mind the entire time. There was daring in her eyes, in her voice. "Let them talk of me then, as they sweep my crippled body off the courtyard. Let the Parisians speak of me then! I'd rather die at my own choosing than die an old crone here."

Thomas frowned at her. His eyes were diverted to the ground. _Mud doesn't stand a chance against green fire,_ he thought. The woman huffed, sat on the blanket he'd given her. Her knees went up to her chest, her chin resting atop them. The fury remained, but swirled along with the air in her cell, flirting with whatever thought she kept to herself.

Thomas sighed. It'd been a long day, and a longer afternoon. It'd be a longer night still.

The snowflake ring with its brilliant diamond cut was snug on her index finger, and were it not for the sword at his side, Thomas would've thought that it would have been the sharpest thing in the room.

He left her alone until evening. As the other prisoners began to settle down for sleep, she remained awake.

One day in and she was the lull of the Bastille and the plague wind that swept up the Porte Saint-Antoine.

* * *

Thomas waited.

When he returned to his shift early that evening as the light ebbed from the sky and the feudal towers swallowed the setting sun, he expected the _whoosh _one hears as someone falls from a great height.

He waited for the thump, the _squelch _as every bone known and unknown in the human body was broken; as organs burst from the impact and the remains slithered into a scarlet river from an open skull. He waited to see the impacted limbs, the open mouth capturing the last minute of pain before the body reached its final destination.

He walked, he looked up, he waited. No body fell. No shouts from surprised _ge__ô__lier__s _who could do nothing but stare, stricken, as a woman tore the iron bars from the window in her roughshod hands and flew to what she thought was Heaven. No de Launay screaming to the point where his eyes bulged demanding where, _how, why _it had all gone wrong; how, once again, he was responsible for a calamity within an inch of his control.

The fading June heat reigned. Quiet prevailed. Heads were alone with their tumultuous thoughts.

The courtyard and its tender gardens remained clear. The rose bushes swayed with the tickle of the breeze, the weeds overgrown and defiant in the fight with better, prettier flowers. The chains holding the drawbridge clinked with leftover tension. They were the only things vibrating with force and life in this place. Once night settled in, _citoyens _would see the massive husk of the feudal prison, immovable and dreadful, guarding the gates of Paris.

As far as prisons went, the Bastille's reputation as a feudal torture chamber was spun from rumour and legends dark as the shadows thrown on the towers when the moon disappeared for a night. The courtyard was a pleasant place to be, especially in the springtime, where visitors could chat with each other and even send alcohol and other gifts to prisoners without bribes. The escapades of Jean-Henri Latude and his escape from the Bastille had been an exciting and thrilling adventure to critiques of the prison, but to the people currently there in it was too fantastical and too tiring to try. Living in the Bastille was, for most, better than living slovenly existences in what was considered life in Paris. Food and drink were plentiful, and requests for books, clothes, perfumes and just about anything that could fit the bill of contraband was allowed.

Every night, Thomas was given a list for items the prisoners requested. Predictably, the Marquis de Sade had the most specific, intricate list, and would stress to Thomas to get things _exactly_ as he dictated, or else it would spoil whatever faux-party he was trying to throw (clothed, Thomas hoped, as de Sade would strip naked in the later hours and cry out the bars about how terrible, _terrible _life was inside). Others were simpler, like finding letters from a redhead whose lover waxed complete poetic about her or 'water that didn't taste like piss, can't be that hard, can it?' A few of the legitimately mentally unwell prisoners only wanted clean blankets and something warm to snuggle into at night. Easily said, easily done.

It was to Thomas' consternation, then, when de Launay strode toward him in the courtyard, huffing from what looked like a jaunt from his usual comfortable lodgings deeper inside the prison. He had a note in his hand, a clean edge torn from a leftover newspaper. De Launay waved it at Thomas before putting it in his hands.

The script was neat, crisp and flowing. It was not the to-the-point jots of the few literate prisoners Thomas knew, or the euphemistic sexual poetry of de Sade. It flowed easily and with grace, feminine yet masculine in its directness. The ink still gleamed in the waning light. Thomas raised a brow as he read the note, glancing up at de Launay when he was finished.

"_La __Sorci__è__re? _She's already making requests?"

"_Oui, je sais (Yes, I know). _I suppose one night up in the calottes was enough to make her reconsider her position. I have decided to move her back to Bazinière Tower_. _She'll be away from the men, and, I sincerely _hope, _she does not pull a Latude on us. She's requested cloth for...whatever reason she says." De Launay wiped his brow with a kerchief, and embroidered one initialized at the bottom with M.A. A contraband item on its own, indeed.

Thomas examined the note again. The witch had requested clean cloth, some water, and – she had underlined these – any kind of cleaning material, be it soap or scented water. Both would otherwise be hard to come by, but again, Thomas had an endless supply with the Marquis. One more bottle of rosewater or jasmine or whatever scent caught the naked libertine's fancy would not be missed.

There was no specific requests for food or alcohol. La _Sorci__è__re _had taken the plain soup and bread offered without complaint, as she was too thin and malnourished to eat anything rich. When Henri had noticed that the bowls kept coming back empty, he grunted in surprise. He didn't think she had it in her. The struggle from the previous morning had left her famished. There was little doubt that with food, it would return, and once she gained her strength she would prove to be more difficult than it was worth.

That was the theory. It probably would not end up that way, but it was good to prepare. De Launay had stressed since the days of Latude that predicting ridiculous outcomes was far better than watching them unfold before you. Thomas figured that with her diamond ring returned to her and with time alone to mull, the witch would be amicable and – he crossed himself – tolerant. He did not like the fury that burned within her, coiled and filled with venom like some African snake.

He loathed the man who would ever be caught in its bite. It would not be a mercy killing.

He sighed to himself as he prepared for his shift. "Of all the days I have to serve at this prison...," he left the rest unsaid.

The other prisoners had begun to settle down for the night. The _ge__ô__lier__s _milled about, muttering under their breaths or cursing about another day lost watching a grand total of seven prisoners (now eight) in a prison meant for thousands. What went unsaid was the female prisoner, the fresh arrival only Thomas and the other two guards had actually seen. Lazy-Eye and Snaggletooth (they had names, but Thomas never bothered with them) did not speak about her. It was odd and at the same time it wasn't. They had all expected a crone, or an old aristocratic woman someone wanted to throw away like a diseased piece of sweetmeat after they were dissatisfied with the taste.

What they got for their expectations was again limited to rumour. Thomas did not see either guard that night, and it was for the best. The witch would not enjoy them following her, replete with all the ideas and lewd thoughts she knew were directed at her. It would be left to Thomas once more to complete the task.

As Thomas moved past the lower cells with quiet and careful steps, a pair of blue eyes, mischievous and perverted watched him stroll by. A voice called out to him.

"My...is that a note from _la_ _Sorci__è__re _you're hiding? Do tell! I don't want to be kept in suspense over such a _cr__é__ature magnifique."_

Thomas paused at the question. De Sade's voice was unnaturally soothing, always in a measured tone never raised in disgust, anger, or displeasure. It was disarming, and for Thomas, one of the few guards with a conscience and a desire to see the prisoners treated well, it left him exposed. He almost felt like dragging his boots the way a child does to a reprimanding mother he wishes to avoid. He peered at de Sade, leaning, of course naked, against the bars, an eyebrow raised in interest.

_Here comes an interesting conversation. _If a mental groan could be raised, this was the time.

"I don't think it's to your concern to know what _la s__orci__è__re _wants," Thomas said, avoiding that curious stare. One of the bars acted like a convenient censor against de Sade's genitalia along with a leg placed in front of the other. The Marquis did not much care for social rules around nakedness. He dressed as he pleased, when he pleased, and encouraged others to do the same.

Again came the soothing tone. _"_It should. There hasn't been something so exciting in _ages..._tell me. Is she at _least _under thirty?"

Thomas nearly bit the inside of his cheek. The Marquis noticed, and smirked in that devious way of his. _I like to call it reminiscent of __Dante__, as I flirt with the gates of Hell, _he'd say with a wink. He leaned closer, his pale cheeks brushing against the cool bars.

"You're hesitating a bit there, _monsieur._ Would it be fair to say she's..._supple?"_

"Like a twig in a hailstorm," Thomas found himself saying. It had been the wrong thing to say, for the Marquis' interest had piqued. For all his want of debauchery, the Marquis knew how to get people to speak with loose lips _sans _wine. A useful trait, and a deadly one.

The Marquis de Sade tittered. "Oh well...give it time, I'm sure. And give her a little note of congratulations from me. You don't see many women take the initiative in biting off a man's finger before he proposes to her."

Thomas chuckled without humour. "Be careful, de Sade. If a _mar__é__chauss__é _can scream as loud as that, that's the last thing a man needs in his bed."

A wry smile appeared on the Marquis' face. Thomas could see the shimmer of a white tooth. The smile of a man with ideas too filthy to discuss.

"You're giving me ideas, _monsieur. _Do you think she would mind being portrayed in a novel? I have the _greatest _idea of her in the middle of a Versailles costume party dressed like one of those spotted wildcats. She is all feisty and defiant, clawing off suitors one after the other, until a certain roguish man comes along and fits a quaint little _leash _around her neck..."

Thomas held out a hand. "_Assez parlé (Enough said). _Spare me the plot for later."

"I mean it, f_ossoyeur. _She sounds like the type to enjoy domination and to be dominated...provided it's with a certain man – a very specific one, I might add. Not you, _bien s__û__r. _I'm thinking of someone else..."

Thomas walked away as de Sade started to mutter, head alight with provocative ideas. He was sure that the strange man would not sleep that night, writing furiously under the glow of a single candle and irritating the other prisoners with the _scritch scritch _of a quill on paper. There were times he would go days without sleep, engrossed in his plot lines and novels that were sure to make many blush in both maidenly shock and in furor.

The man who wrote _Les 120 Journ__é__es de Sodome_ was aiming for another magnum opus...and for a stranger no less, and for Thomas to read no lesser.

He preferred the cold fury of the witch already.

* * *

"Do you know the Marquis de Sade?"

The question was asked simply enough, even though the subject wasn't appropriate for gentle conversations. So when the witch raise one of her groomed eyebrows, bread crumbs falling from her lips and her water tin swishing in her hands, Thomas could be comfortable in that she was not easily offended when it came to subjects involving sex.

She swallowed her food in a slow, plotted motion. A tongue ran across her lips. "He's a prisoner here, isn't he?"

"_Oui. _I hope you don't know him – ah – personally?"

She huffed. The air in the calottes was breezy and warm, tickling the strands of hair stuck to her face. She had pleated her hair and it hung casually over one shoulder. "I do not. Should I be thankful?"

"I think you know the answer to that."

She laughed. It was dry, without true laughter behind it, but the noise caught Thomas off guard. Contrasted to the entangling aristocratic lull of the Marquis, it was rough and straightforward. Almost as if the question amused her without actually amusing her.

"The man of 120 Days of Sodom. Fame and controversy, _tr__è__s amusant (very amusing)."_

Thomas tilted his head at that tidbit. "You've read the manuscript?"

She had been toying with her hair off-handed, staring out the window when her attention was re-directed to him. A thought, unspoken and unbidden, crossed her face before it melted into a neutral mask. She did not flirt with fury today, but it looked like she was flirting with some other equally compromising thought.

When she next spoke, it was with care. "...it was contraband. My employer had a copy. She had no intention of reading it, so I did." Her lips twisted downwards in a grimace, a memory of a past conversation gone awry coming back to her. "All that drama for nothing," she muttered.

"Ah," Thomas said, noting the lull. "Who do you work for? If you don't mind me asking?"

She nestled her chin on her knees in a casual position. Here and there, her eyes would flick from him to the window, as if no single location or object could hold her interest for long. To be frank, Thomas preferred it when her direct attention was not on him. Already, he had dealt with three prisoners: the _métis Autrichien, _his teacher, and naturally the Marquis de Sade, who all had that smidgen of intellect that would cleave its way through deception. It was visible in their stares, their stances, their very existence. Thomas was not good at holding his own to people like that.

"There's a chateau outside of Paris in the countryside that has a few heads of cattle and sheep," the witch said, almost to herself. "Farmlands, too, decent soil. They managed to pull in crops when the others failed. It's not wealthy but it's sufficient. I work for the owner of the properties."

"Are there any names I know?" Thomas asked.. "Landed gentry, perhaps?"

"Do you know a _Citoyenne _Madame d'Arracourt?"

Thomas searched through his memories. He'd briefly heard of the name, but it was so small as to be nonexistent. It was located near Lorraine, close to Belgium. It had been annexed by France in 1766, breaking it from its history of sovereignty. The surname of the witch's employer was French, not German as Thomas expected it to be.

"Can't say I have," Thomas said after a while. "Is she important to the court?"

"Not to the court, no. She works for the Assembly. She knows a few of the politicians there and completes military contracts. Her cattle is the reason why French soldiers are fed well – or decently, I should say. Hardly anyone is eating well here."

"All from a woman?" Thomas was impressed. "You'd think there would be more mention of her."

"Family connections," the witch replied. "That's the only reason why no one is dismissing her. Her father and uncles were quite wealthy and gave much to this country. The male heirs died young or were incompetent. They chose her because she was the only one who could manage their money."

"Strange."

"What is?" The witch noticed his abrupt silence, examined his face as it was drawn in thought. She squinted at him. Had it been a mistake to speak so freely to a stranger? To her _ge__ô__lier_?

Thomas was not paying attention to her. He rubbed his chin, coarse stubble brushing against his calloused thumbs. The witch stood up, a fresh nightgown billowing around her frame as she sauntered towards him.

"You speak rather fondly of her. So why did she send you here?" When Thomas looked up, he jerked when he saw how close she was. Close and cutting as a glacier, she tore through that red line he considered his personal space as easily as if she were brushing away a moth.

She was still, yet ever so animated. They were about a foot away from each other."She didn't send me here. I was _arrested. _For -

"A crime you didn't commit?" Thomas interrupted. "Forgive me, _madamoiselle, _but that excuse gets thrown around more than the Holy Bible. You don't seem the type to use it -"

" - For a man who looked at me as if I was some sort of _demon_," the witch shot back. "_I_ didn't immolate him. _He_ did. Obviously, no amount of testifying is going to clear my case. No one witnessed the damn thing, so how could they help me? How could _you?" _She glared at him. Her lips were in a tight line, but it had only emphasized their plumpness.

Poor Thomas, biting the bullet for the third time. He sighed, slowly, palms out again. His sabre hung at his side, even though he had had no reason to use it. He didn't think the witch would be frightened by it; on the contrary, she had eyed it as if it were an annoying tree branch thumping against her window. An epaulette had fallen askew on one shoulder, and the kerchief around his neck began to itch from nervous sweat.

"Easy," Thomas said. "Someone had vouched for you, and it was good that they did. _La Grand Force _isn't as fantastic – the witch had raised an eyebrow again - "but at least in the Bastille you would not be molested. I am trying to be polite with you. I would appreciate it if you'd extend the same to me, especially since I have given you everything you have asked for."

"Except my freedom," the witch said. It was meant to be a bitter barb, but it died in her throat as her eyes moved downward. She exhaled through her nose. The fight was extinguished. "You're right. _Je suis vraimont désolé__e (I am very sorry). _I'm not – I just didn't expect..._this." _She gestured at her surroundings: at the little mountain of pillow she'd set up as a bed, at the looking glass she'd cleaned to a decent shine, at the table where she set her food. Disappointment set in.

She was about to sit down on her blanket when Thomas motioned for her to remain standing. "I came here tonight to tell you you're being moved."

"Where?" A gentle light sparkled in her eyes.

"To Bazinière Tower. It will be far more comfortable than here. You'll have better lodgings, maybe a decent cot that isn't nestled next to a rooftop?" Thomas smiled. "What do you say?"

"_Je n'ai pas le choix (I don't have a choice). _Do as you will."

Thomas extended an arm, and the witch took it. He lead her down from the calottes, their steps in tune with one another. Her hands kept a firm grip on his arm, feeling the tightness of his muscles there. They walked as if they were going to see the fireworks launched at the Palace of Versailles. They did not act as if they were jailer and prisoner, but two people eager to see excitement in a dull world greyed by misery.

If Thomas had ever taken _la s__orci__è__re _to such a gala, there was little doubt she'd be the shining jewel of the event. By his side she felt like some kind of lithe spotted wildcat, the exact description de Sade had used when mentioning her.

Maybe she was surprised he did not chain her hands behind her back or tie ropes around her ankles to prevent her from escaping. Maybe she felt that this modicum of trust was of little use. Regardless of what she thought at the moment, Thomas was an anchor for her, though he didn't know it yet. The witch had no reason to flee because she felt strangely at ease with this man, her jailer, whom she'd only known for a day.

If only Thomas had known where she had come from, what she had done to get here...well. Maybe he'd immolate himself too.

As they walked side by side, arms looped in one another's and no words exchanged between them, Thomas heard a voice call up to them.

"Oh, _monsieur_, do come down and tell me what you think of this manuscript! I think you'll find it _delicious."_

Thomas bit the inside of his cheek, deep and hard, and let the taste of copper distract him from what he just heard.


	3. Fantôme de la nuit

**_The poor French is entirely my own fault._**

* * *

_June 9th, 1789_

No one had seen her bolt from the Bazinière Tower to the Liberté Tower.

The plume of her nightgown, sticky with heat and sweat against her skin, danced like a floating cloud across stones as she made her way from one end of the prison to the other. In the blackness of night it was an ethereal sight: a shapeless, starched white form moving with a gazelle's grace and speed that pricked at the edges of peripheral visions. Muscle memory guided her in a world without torches, a world without light or ambient noises. The midnight June air cooled the sweat on her skin and made her melt into the incomplete slumber of Paris.

No one had seen her. She had memorized the _ge__ô__lier__s _rotations down to when they'd bring out the cook who'd dump the refuse not eaten during the day. She waited for voices to flutter up to her birdcage like hummingbird's wings, and with them the pacing of boots masking irritable French twangs. At 11 pm on the mark there would be banging on the bars of a cell in the Liberté, mock-wails of mercy flowing out like the tickle of a feather.

There was nothing else to do but memorize and watch.

It became easier to file away the hourly comings and goings because her jailer, Thomas, had provided her with a time-piece: a leftover, scuffed and meagre bronze thing with ticks that gave her small comforts at night. Her throat throbbed from the dead screams in her voice box, reminding her that after the world had had enough of your tears, your struggle, silence was what reigned in the end. Silence, the crown of nothingness. Be silent and wait, said the unknown. Be silent and be good for those unmoved by your useless protests.

No more. The isolation and the quiet _tick-ticks_ of her timepiece clawed at her mind like a mole through wet soil, so aggravating and deep she needed to claw her way to the surface. So, when others were busy among themselves or had settled for their fitful bouts of sleep, she would scratch at the lock on her door, find the small piece of brass she hid under her blanket, and pick until the door gave way. She would open it until the hinges began to squeak, squeeze her body the rest of the way through, and run in feet adorned with stockings. Her boots would have given her away; going barefooted would be open evidence she had escaped. With stockings that hugged her mid-thigh rather than below the knee as was custom, she sprinted from tower to tower, silent and quick with every corner imprinted on her memory.

There was a nagging question, a curiosity in her mind that needed to be satisfied. That week she had mulled over it, watching her jailer's reaction as she answered 'Yes, of course I read it' in regards to that _pervers (pervert) _with the twelve metre long manuscript he kept away from searching eyes. She hadn't asked then why her jailer had read the manuscript himself; why he didn't report it to his superior, which was what he was required to do. It had been clear Thomas, an aged fifty-something with mismatched blonde hair and a square face resembling flatbread, had a decent repertoire among the prisoners so as to read their filthy secrets without gushing his guilty conscience to the man who paid his wages. Thomas had been easy to talk to, easy to confide the basics in. Easy enough to understand that certain things could not be explained or said, or how she simply could not handle being in this prison anymore.

Even witches can go mad with no one but their own company.

It had only been a week. Unless she found something to occupy her overactive mind, she truly would rip the bars off her cage and fly to the paradise she'd dreamt of since arriving here. Thankfully, such thoughts were put on hold the moment she learned she could open her own birdcage and flutter wherever she wished, provided she returned before anyone noticed. Such dissatisfied thoughts were satisfied more when she found the men she'd been separated from.

Two were clearly ill in the head through no fault of their own. One rocked himself to sleep in slow turns with his nails gripping the fabric of his chemise for comfort, while the other would sit at his side of the wall humming to no one's pleasure but his own. Their age couldn't be specified, but she had guessed they were in their thirties, provided the lines drawn by broken nails and premature age didn't muddy her guess.

Farther down were the more mentally well and physically fit men, including the fencers Thomas talked about. She had not seen their faces and they had not seen hers – yet. There was an incident several days before when she had crept too far down the hallway, gaining a clear view (as far as the wall torches would permit) of one of them sitting on his cot against the wall. There was a familiarity to that one: his large chest shown with a v-neck, dark if not messy hair dangling around his face and a gruff easiness in his surroundings. Only when his profile turned to a full frontal view, when she could see the trimmed beard hiding the weathered wrinkles and the frown tugging at his face, did she scramble into the darkness and rush back to her nest.

She hadn't stayed to see him peer after her in the dark, or hear his student ask him what he was staring at. She waited for Thomas to barge into her cell, demanding of her what was she doing in the men's quarters at that time of night? Didn't she know she was forbidden from ever seeing them, and them of her? How she was supposed to be one of the Bastille's best and worst kept secrets? Oh, she knew the secrets. The rumours. How the one who took her ring, the ugly one with a leering face and teeth jagged and pitted like the trunk of a termite gnawed tree, would ask after Thomas to see if she was getting better, fitter, _prettier. _

Let them talk, she reasoned. She was bred to evoke reaction and controversy. It was her blood and spirit. Her will took care of the rest. Before, she had been an anonymous person keeping her head down, avoiding the ravages of the world and trying not to upset the balance of a place she had no right to be in. Now? She was a witch. An outsider. Murderer of a playwright. What part she played in that fiasco - the man looking at her as if she was a resurrected corpse or a phantom of the night, cursing her very existence - was hitherto unknown. But if she had to survive in this new climate, this new terrain, she had to go along with it.

Survival didn't always mean playing smart to those who expected you to play their games. Still she did not give a motive to the man who self-immolated; still she did not speak of her innocence or her guilt. She did not give anyone her name. Yes, she was going to play that game, the game of Guess Who. No one said she couldn't be evasive. Name-dropping only helped if you knew your case was going to be vindicated, and vindication wasn't in the books or even the margins. Sometimes survival meant playing the self-destruct card, or in her case, the 'I'm-going-to-poke-the-bear-and-see-if-he-hits-me' card.

If poking the bear meant entertainment and excitement, she was going to do it.

She returned to Liberté Tower again that night. She wanted to satisfy her nagging questions, of which two took top priority: one was the _métis Autrichien, _the prisoner closest to her in age, and two, the ignominious Marquis de Sade.

It was wrong to refer to the young man as a 'half-breed', for she was equally a half-breed. She was half-Russian, as she constantly stressed to Thomas, because it was a nationality easily recognized. They wouldn't recognize the other half of her, a breed from the Caucasus mountains as disengaged and dormant from the world like the Siberian Traps. However, if the man was as haughty and undeserving of attention as she'd heard, maybe he _did _deserve the name. Still. She didn't know him. But that didn't mean she wasn't interested in _what_ he was – the 'what' always made her drawn to people.

As for the latter, well that was self-explanatory. He would come second.

Were she to be spied again by the bearded man she would not have a second chance to escape. He would report her to Thomas, as he was her handler and by far the one with the most intelligence out of all the _gardes. _First-time luck ensured his complacency towards her, but second or third chances would make her appear untrustworthy. The bearded man and his student surpassed Thomas in his perceptiveness, with the younger one likely to tattle on her first, _if_ everything she heard about his stuck-up and entitled attitude was true; if he'd be the one to rattle her cage with that wooden stick he used to practice with.

That last concern would turn out to be the most accurate.

* * *

Her name was Marceline.

No one had asked her for it, and she had not provided one when the _mar__é__chauss__é _found her on that Parisian street, a crumpled pamphlet in her hand and an eerie calmness on her face as she watched Luc Comtois collapse into a charred heap of striped breeches and stinking leather. Briefly, the refuse he landed next to caught flame, but was extinguished from the sheer filth and weight of the pile. He'd had wild, badly cut auburn hair; scarecrow's hair. There was an audience around him not thirty minutes before, listening to him speak about the _Estates General _and how keen politicians were to silence the people. The Third Estate, he had said, was all of them: all men and women and the generations yet to be born, crushed under the silk and gem-studded heels of those who never went a day without food on their plates, their wealth pronounced like game trophies on their walls.

The Third Estate needed people to lead it into a new life, a new direction. All of them had to take part; all of them had to poke the proverbial bear and slaughter the sacred lamb and cow that was government censorship. The crowd cheered, tossing up blue and red ribbons in silk and placing coloured roses made in simple glass at his feet, tributes to a man who was a breath away from being sent to the _La Grand Force. _It all occurred in the most convenient place: Faubourg Saint-Antoine, east of the Bastille and where a mirror factory suffered a riot when workers were told their wages would be cut not two months before.

Whether it was poetic justice or poetic irony, Marceline could not say. Comtois had been no Mirabeau or Lamourette, lacking the formal education of both and the erotic sensibilities of the former. He'd been, to that point, a general nobody to those in the know. To the _citoyens et citoyennes, _he was a celebrated playwright who broke the rules and waved a bayonet on stage, braying 'the best riot is a riot with knives!' to the excited crowd. Thirty minutes later, when the crowd thinned out and the last glass cockade had been tucked away, the crown of thorns had been nailed into his smoking forehead.

Comtois, the scarecrow man who was supposed to be a nobody, became a martyr. He had screamed like a swine with a blade to its throat, all to a woman who hadn't an inkling of who he was.

She told herself she needed a new name for her new life. It would be a cliché to say she never wanted this to happen. It'd be predictable that she would not receive a trial or see the books thrown at her pretty head. It'd be bizarre if the inhabitants of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, instead of demanding blood for blood, had been equally fascinated and horrified at the murder.

Marceline was equally a martyr herself in this instance: a woman wronged, an _étrangerère (outsider)_ given the worst kind of welcome to their fair city, and a metaphor for the civil situation as a whole. It'd been a shock when she started receiving notes from learned women and gifts from the illiterate ones, all of them wondering who and what she was and wishing her well in such an awful predicament. "Be a symbol to the people" said one. "You are an inspiration for me. I left my horrible husband yesterday. _Dieu vous b__é__nisse! (May God bless you!)" _"We learned women will always be seen as witches. Take the rope from around your neck and hang the _b__â__tards (bastards) _with it!"

Well. Definitely interesting. Perhaps it was a way to make people forget their own miserable lives by imagining hers as so great, a touch of inspiration and wonder that superseded the fact that she killed someone. Maybe they just didn't care and Luc Comtois - _l'homme des __é__pouvantails (the scarecrow man) - _was a fraud. Who knew? Who knows? Who _cared_? Marceline didn't. She just wanted to get the Hell out of here and back _home_...but that was faraway, a goal so unattainable she was better off fighting the leprechaun for his gold at the end of a rainbow.

For now, she wanted to be entertained. Boredom was a greater killer than a brain fever, and like those brain fevers it pulsed from her forehead to the deepest reaches of her brain. In the calottes, she had the wind and the howls drowning out sounds of a city she visited once, years ago, in the crispness of December and warm in her furs. The memories bit at her skin like frostbite, and Marceline would have shivered if not for the June heat. All there was left in the name of comfort was the night, embracing and empty, and it satisfied her bored, wandering mind.

The scribble of a quill on paper told her that the Marquis was still awake. It did not surprise her; creative thoughts, especially lewd ones, would come in sudden bursts when the rest of the body yearned for sleep. Donatien was a particular man, even down to the "instruments" he inserted into his own body. The thing that interested – or disgusted, if she had an inkling of what he was writing and whom it featured – Marceline was how long the man could write. By now the other prisoners had accustomed themselves to his paper scratching long into the morning hours. Rolls of his manuscript bunched around his ankles like the spores of a mushroom; after a hearty 'rain', they'd sprout, erotic spores floating in the air.

Marceline watched as one after another fell to the floor. In his seat, the Marquis' back to her, the upholstery of red velveteen and carved wood hid most of his frame. His wig remained as still as a weather-vane in the absence of wind. Deep in his muse, he had not noticed her existence. The torches at this point were lit only at certain places in the hallway, giving the prisoners enough darkness for sleep and adding comfort for those who needed it. The _gardes_ were in the kitchen playing cards with the cook. There were so few prisoners, they reasoned. They didn't need to watch them _all_ of the time.

The swept stones were smooth under her feet. Violet and the scent of roses permeated the air up through the arches and around to her nostrils. Her nose twitched at the smells the way a mouse's did, careful and attuned, half enjoying the smell and half wanting to sneeze. She peered at the Marquis' back, at his pale skin and the unwrinkled back as another sheaf of paper fell to his feet.

He stretched with a yawn, the quill firmly in one hand and a manuscript coated in black ink in the other.

Marceline saw his arms, his back and shoulders stretching, and a realization came to her, unusual and out-of-place.

_He isn't fat._

He _wasn't_ fat. Just the opposite: he looked lithe and lean, with no loose skin or hanging folds of flesh which would have been signs he had lost the weight. He looked underweight by contrast, if his legs were anything to go by. Rather than consume exotic, rich foods by the plateful hour by hour, the food that sat on his small dining table went uneaten. The wine had been consumed in its stead, three bottles standing in a crate away from his precious manuscripts.

_What in the Hell? _Marceline thought. A man who loved eating eel pâté was content eating mere apples and dates? Drinking simple fruit juice and leftover Bordeaux wine instead of sparkling wine? Hiding his _120 Days of Sodom_ from everyone else bar Thomas, a man who didn't seem to be the least bit interested in matters of politics or erotica?

Someone had to hit her in the head with a frying pan or slap her cheeks to break her stupor. This was getting too bizarre.

"I told you not to stare, Pisspot."

Marceline froze, both at the brusque masculine voice and the slight tilting of the Marquis' head at the sudden outburst. Her eyes flicked to the cell over, seeing the man who'd spied her the night before. The light was reduced from the first time he'd seen her, and while Marceline was thankful for the cover, she wouldn't be able to notice if any of them were watching her. She was twenty or so feet away from the Marquis, who was still distracted with his work.

"I'm not even _staring_ at you. I'm staring at the wall _behind_ you."

Ah...there was the half-breed. Sarcasm flowed off his tongue as if it was syrup, natural and flowing. Impatience backed his tone as if all his time spent in one cell couldn't be wasted for another minute. There was little fatigue in his voice, and it was brusque in its own youthful way, without the drawl and bluntness of his mentor.

Marceline quite liked it, finding an allure in the arrogance and sass. The boy who cried out to his jailers on how he was innocent, how this was all a mistake, wasn't present. This was a young man defiant even with a collar of iron bars around his neck. And now, he was having a verbal bitch fight with his cellmate.

"Of course you are, boy. Figures you'd be paying attention to _les éraflures des poules (chicken scratches) _now and not earlier," the older one said.

"As if the first few weeks weren't enough, _vieux cochon (dirty old man)?" _the younger one shot back.

"And how much did it take to convince you that they weren't simple chalk drawings? What, did you think we decided to play with coloured chalk? It'd pass the time."

"_Lâche-moi un peu (for Heaven's sake). _This again? Reminder that _I_ was the one who spotted them in the first place. _You_ were the one playing the headless goose looking for them."

"If you want, Pisspot, I'll go ask the jailer for some of that chalk so you can make pretty pictures of your own to feel proud of. Maybe you can break into a few other prisons to draw some more, and say you did it to solve a puzzle."

There was an indignant huff from the younger man, equally displeased at the tête-a-tête. Far from throwing a tantrum and pulling the usual excuses, the young man didn't give any indication he was willing to give up; in fact, he appeared to _enjoy_ such arguments like a wolverine poking at the steel trap meant to ensnare it.

Marceline could almost feel him rolling his eyes. "_Bi__en s__û__r," _he started, "I could always use that chalk to fill in the missing teeth from your jaw."

The atmosphere dipped in temperature then. Or had the stickiness on her flesh cooled enough for her to feel the change in the air? Marceline could sense the tension, felt it weigh on her forehead down to her ankles like a ball and chain. There was a sense that these two argued often, and intensely. It did not surprise her, for Marceline would have done the same if she had a cellmate with sarcasm that bit deep into the marrow and was salved with the smoothest honey.

Or would she? If her rival had spoken as richly as that, charming in its defiance, she'd have an even playing field...or she would be too distracted by the easy tone.

Ah, boredom had such an effect on lonely women. Now she was dreaming about arguing with a man she hadn't even seen..._pitoyable (pitiful). _

"Say that again, Pisspot," the bearded one rumbled. From her hiding place, she could see him lean forward, almost see his eyes narrowed in challenge.

"_Ici __(here)__, _I'll be diligent and ask for the fancy colours myself - " A pause. A lowered tone coated with its own challenge, " - so I can fix your jaw."

The tension, coiled and tight like the suspenders on a bridge, snapped then. Just as the older one lunged to his feet, ready to strangle his younger cellmate, the Marquis de Sade decided to pitch in.

"Ah, _monsieurs,_ have we not gone through this before? It won't be an enjoyable night if the _ge__ô__lier__s _return from their backgammon and faro card games to rough you two up again," he cooed, not turning his head.

"Every night is an enjoyable night with your incessant _scratching," _spat the younger one. "_Nom de Dieu_, what are you spending all those hours on? Another sensational work to drive the priests mad with your insults to the sacrosanct?"

"It is a _splendid_ thing of beauty, _mon ami. _I hope one day you'll manage to discover my muse," de Sade purred. There Marceline saw him turn his head in their direction, a smirk flirting with his lips.

Marceline wasn't new to arguments. They'd been as common to her as a seasonal cold, and in most cases she initiated them. With her, if the argument came from her side of the table, she did it with the full intent to win. A veneer of aloofness with icy crispness would blanket her, unyielding and unbreakable. She would fight until she made her rival kiss her high-heeled, diamond-and-sapphire encrusted shoes.

Marceline just felt awkward here, because she wasn't the intended party nor was she invited (and sans shoes). She was eavesdropping on them solely because she was bored. She wanted to spy on them, keep a mental record of them and wonder who they were and what they did in their lives before the Bastille. Sure, she could have easily opened correspondence with them, but again, Marceline was supposed – read: _supposed_ in emphasized language – to be a best-kept secret. Rather stupid to keep that mode of thinking, especially when candies and thank-you notes from the legion of female fans you didn't know you had kept pouring in.

_These guys really are bundles of joy,_ Marceline thought. _They'd sound better drunk -_

" _\- _You're lucky I don't have a spoon, Pisspot. I could kill you twelve ways with it."

An 'ooh' accompanied the threat, a lighthearted response to a man who probably meant every threat he ever made. "Why not make it thirteen? It's an unlucky number. Can you manage one more, old man?" The sassy one humphed. "You don't even _have_ a spoon."

"If life is a bowl of soup, you're all goddamned forks."

There was a moment when Marceline felt like she'd wound chicken wire around her neck, barbs nicking at the tender flesh of her throat, the wire wrapping tight around tendons and arteries, and it was all because she'd done a stupid, unbelievably stupid thing. The realization of that stupid mistake came in that metaphor. Marceline wanted to garrote herself more than ever in that moment.

It hadn't even registered that the silvery voice with its dramatis personae was her own.

Marceline's statement had not been kept inside her head. She had said it out loud, and all of the men had heard it. Her hiding place, an alcove of shadow beneath an extinguished torch, was now useless.

Seconds, minutes passed before Marceline's legs willed her to bolt, to return to that gazelle-like speed and rush through the corridors back to her cage. Things happened in a slow, choreographed motion: the snapping shut of the older man's jaw, the pursed lips of the younger one hitherto unseen, the easy turn of the Marquis de Sade's head and the raised, darkened eyebrow. All heads were turning on slow moving necks, all of them focused in her direction.

When time quickened, the alcove was abandoned, and Marceline was darting past sleeping guards and rosebushes as she entered the open courtyard. The dancing white cloud had adopted the speed of a funnel cloud, sucking in air as it grew in power towards the ground. Marceline did not stop running until she found her cell, door ajar, and shut herself inside. She took the brass bar she used as a lockpick to re-lock the door, sitting on her cushions and trying to ease her heartbeat. Her pulse roared in her ears, battering her ear drums like hail stones on a window.

Her fingernails dug so deep into a cushion some of its stuffing came out. Teeth gnawed at her lips, brain burning with worry. A week into her imprisonment and the male prisoners knew she was more than a ghost, a rumour. She was a person, she existed, and she foolishly offered her own bit of sass to a pair of arguing fencers ready to open their throats.

The skin on her bottom lip opened, her tongue skimming over the thin trail of blood. It was a tiny price, a negligible price to pay.

The morning could not come fast enough.

* * *

_**Notes:**_

_**\- According to the foreword for the '120 Days of Sodom', de Sade had become obese while imprisoned in the Bastille. The subtle change from history to in-game will have a larger purpose in this story. **_

_**\- de Sade did indeed have a 12 metre long manuscript. His showing it to Thomas is again creative license on my part. **_

_**\- The tri-colour cockades had not yet been made an official symbol of the Revolution, but other cockades made the rounds. **_


	4. Chair pour les chiens

_**All errors are mine and mine alone.**_

* * *

_June 10th_

Two days after the feline-esque s_orci__è__re_ entered the Bastille, the young dauphin of France, Louis-Joseph, a sweet, precious boy and the Queen's final hope for redemption, succumbed to the wasting sickness. On June 7th, clad in black, the Austrian queen, with twitching lips and eyes red and raw from her pain, struggled to hold back her floodwater tears at her long train of mourners. Her ladies and courtiers surrounded her in this enclosed world of black silk and ribbons against gilded gold panelling and shadows cast by shuttered windows. If one could enter the mind of the queen at that moment, they'd shut the shutters to the world itself.

Among the citizens, particularly those of the deputies belonging to the Third Estate, the reaction was different. No sympathy – or if there was, it was as mute as a dead boy's cheers – was extended. Parisians bemoaned the closed theatres and lack of entertainment and fantasy. Deputies who did not appreciate discreetness saw it as yet another excuse for the Queen to avoid pestering her husband on tax reform. Versailles had been emptied of most of its staff to ease its money troubles, with only a few stragglers left behind to attend their grief-stricken monarch.

"His son is much less ill than the state," a deputy had said. "Our Austrian Queen dresses in black for a dead child, but dances in her own frivolity when it comes to France bleeding from the mouth." Thomas was inclined to agree, but it was no source of amusement to anyone to have a child die from the wasting sickness. It emptied homes, burning its way through one family member to the next, with the survivor watching their loved ones clutch to white linen sheets dappled from their coughing blood.

He had wondered how he had not managed to catch it, given how many corpses he buried when he worked at _Cimiti__è__re des Innocents _before it was decommissioned in 1786, or gathering bodies from the _Cours de Miracles. _He had sliced fat from bloated corpses, sending it off to chemists for soap; he'd dug up trinkets and brooches and hidden notes from the seams of waistcoats and shoes, scraping off dried blood and humours all. He'd dumped lye on mounds of putrefying flesh, and been bit from every mosquito in Versailles' mock marshes, waiting for the fevers to bloom across his forehead.

Yes, Thomas _le fossoyeur (gravedigger) _was lucky, but he did not like to play his tarot cards very often. At his middle age of 51, he surpassed most Parisians in age and experience. Those who did not take their own lives after the harsh winters whipped through their bones succumbed to a variety of illnesses, not in the least the entrenched poverty that could be found a street away. In his g_arde français__e _uniform, really the only nice set of clothing he owned, he was accosted daily for news on the queen and the guards at the palace. It usually took one look at the frayed threads, the missing buttons, holey breeches, boots nipped from vermin, and the splayed, unkempt epaulettes for them to conclude that he must have been one of the thousands released from service, per Louis XVI's budget cuts.

In reality, it had been years since he had ever stepped foot on any terrace in Versailles. He'd been released from service 15 or so years ago, and had only been given a guard position at the Bastille thanks to the intervention of one of the Lorraine nobles, whom he'd earned a good friendship with. It was not enough to earn the title of a courtier (and truth be told, he didn't want the baggage such a title held nowadays) but it paid for his father's lodgings and it earned him a good set of eyes and ears in the political realm.

Those ears of his suddenly became valuable, because after leaving his night shift on the 2nd a mob of women approached him on his way to _Les Invalides. _A curious bunch, not exactly bothersome, from varying walks of life who left him in varying degrees of discomfort. Seamstresses from Porte Saint-Antoine, furniture makers from Faubourg Saint-Antoine, learned women from _Place de Grève_, and a few curios collectors from Saint-Denis all huddled around him, following him like the Queen's bridal procession. Instead of offering congratulations – or, on later dates, condolences for a dead dauphin - they were all asking him about the mysterious new prisoner at the Bastille.

They held notes of appreciation in their hands and baskets full of goodies. One had weaved a riding habit done in ivory white for the witch to don on her pretty head. One had a kerchief full of candies of chocolates, caramel and small cakes glittering with gold sparkles, things the peasantry living a street away would riot at the sight of. Yet another had a tarot deck, talismans of quartz crystal, and other good-luck charms she believed would serve the stranger better than she did. There had been a brief fight over that among the learned women and the superstitious ones: how could they, in such a time of scientific adventure, cling to such pagan, irrational beliefs? The answer given was that even in an age of science, there was always the possibility of the unknown; of forces beyond mankind's control. Black magic and similar occult-like practices thrived in Paris like undead roaches, with treatises written on them as public as the pornography featuring the Queen and her duchesses.

It had gotten to the point in their ceaseless arguments where Thomas threw up his hands, heaved a dramatic sigh, and shouted, "_Laissez-moi en dehors de tout ça! (Leave me out of this!)" _

Woe to Thomas if he thought he would catch a moment of relief. One week later, the women were still there, although this time there was a face among them that he recognized: a huge, muscular, astute _poissarde _waiting for her daily _mets hideux (horrible foodstuff) _named Veronique. She would travel from Île Saint-Louis to the place d'Armes when the palace was operating, but with recent events – the death of the young dauphin, raging delegates from the Estates-General, food riots in all corners of the kingdom, bizarre crimes happening in the poorer section of the town – the supply and the demand dried up. Veronique had to return to her old haunt bordering the Seine, flitting from place to place to find steady employment.

She noticed Thomas first, beckoning him over with a large, scarred hand. In her youth, her hair had been a brilliant auburn. Hardship and a bad bloodline caused her hair to prematurely turn grey, though she tried to compensate with rouge powder and other dyes. Her face was relatively free of wrinkles, but she had hard lines around her mouth that gave her the appearance of a disapproving pug. Her nails were short and chipped, fingers calloused and hard from handling fillet knives. At 5'6 she was not much shorter than him, but she could easily wield a bayonet if the situation called for it: whereas others turned thin and sallow from poor nutrition, as a _poissarde _she was entitled to all the scrap her knife could find. No one questioned how a _poissarde _got so large, but the legends of howling fishwives, prepared to fight when their men fell in combat, was not lost in the public's memory. That was one of the reasons – her curt, audacious attitude being another – crowds would part when she walked by.

A set of brown eyes flecked with yellow and green looked him over. A dimple formed when she smiled. "You're doing well, _citoyen."_

"As are you, Veronique," Thomas nodded at her. He eyed the market stalls in front of him. They were closed for the afternoon, rickety stalls sagging on uneven ground. "It appears the _regrat_ market disappeared along with the royal retinue. I'm not used to seeing this place empty."

Veronique snorted. Her nose rippled when she did that, like a child tickling the surface of a pond. "Oh, I know where they all went. To the _Cour des Miracles, _where that ghostly man is taking them for tribute. _Le Roi des Thunes _they call him. He's your reason why people pack up and leave during midday. I don't even see them fight over rations."

Thomas frowned. Individuals calling themselves kings in an age where royalist sympathies earned a knife in your back was...brazen. To have a reputation that emptied market stalls during the busiest days of the year, food shortages notwithstanding, was also startling to note. He had not heard of this man the month before, so that meant he was a recent addition; an ill wind blowing from the south with all the vapours in its breeze.

"Is that not asking for trouble?" Thomas asked, toying with a button. It fell off and skittered across the stones. "Why hasn't someone opened his throat for using that title?"

Veronique shrugged, her ruined Brunswick dress, once a royal blue, ruffling on her shoulders. "_Je ne sais pas (I don't know). _But the women I work with are getting anxious. We used to stay late into the morning hours, waiting for any leftover catch. When the first girl went missing we started to wonder if the whispers were true, that that ghostly man had his pickings. When the third came back with her legs missing below the knee, we decided to move back to Île Saint-Louis. Versailles might have been abandoned by royalty but look at the rot that cropped up." Veronique turned up her nose. "_Écoeurant (Disgusting)."_

Thomas shook his head slowly. Muggings and murder were common in the poorer side of Versailles. There was no commerce in the town; all the wealth and employment was for the court's benefit. With Louis XVI's budget cuts and the nobility preferring privacy over public affairs, the town, after decades of ballooning to 70,000 people, began to shrink. The one thing that did not was murder, and if this brute was harassing women as far away as the Île de la Cité, it was more than just a cause for concern.

It was a disaster that could not and would not be solved, not by royal edict or the roar of ten thousand guns.

"But that does not explain why you are in the Île de la Cité and not_ Les Invalides," _she said, changing the subject. Veronique had, at that point, linked an arm with his and was leading him away from the small group of stragglers waiting for news on his charge. It'd become a common occurrence, and the crowd had gone from three or four inquisitive salon women to two dozen mobbing him for a celebrity's personal affairs. He was thankful for the break she offered him. Veronique walked with him to one of the bridges leading to the mainland, knowing that there was enough ambient noise to ensure privacy there.

In the distance the Notre Dame cathedral stood against the June sun, the heat dry and parching against its coloured rose windows and smooth stone edifice. Rain had been scarce in the past few summers, leaving things dusty and light, as if they'd all blow away with the slightest breath. Veronique would walk with Thomas to the riverfront to discuss business with him, knowing that the stench of the river would drive away more sensitive noses – and ears. It'd become second nature to her to know his moods, and he respected her for that. A wife without a ring, a partner without a contract. True fraternity.

Veronique also knew her way around the city, having lived on the streets half of her life. The islands, the countryside, and the richest districts were imprinted on her mind like the cuts on her hands from slippery blades. Through several alleyways and shortcuts, past bakeries, workshops, and a glass maker's business, Thomas' curious entourage became lost in the Parisian throng. Alone at the stone bridge blocking the river, Veronique turned to him. The sun highlighted the red tints of her hair, a scuffed copper too poor to appraise.

A little quirk tickled at the edge of her mouth. "So. _La Sorci__è__re de la Bastille. _I suspect she's more than the rumours entail? She's been nothing but a sting on the imagination."

Veronique was fond of using fanciful words she'd overheard courtiers and well-to-do people use. She liked to think it made her more articulate. To Thomas it just seemed she was trying too hard to appear well-bred. But he did admire her astuteness, her to-the-point opinions, and that was a reason why he felt guilty over this conversation.

Thomas sighed. He wore no tricorne or helmet, but felt like he should to protect his head from pounding questions. His scalp itched from the heat and from the uncomfortable situation he was put in. It'd been easier to brush away strangers' concerns, mainly because they had no business knowing and he had the authority to push them away. Veronique was too mutinous for that, preferring to stick the proverbial knife under the chin to get what she wanted, polite society little more than the fish entrails she cleaned out from under her nails to her.

He watched her and the people who milled behind them: baskets of bread on their backs, horses plowing through mucked streets lined with straw in the gutters, some well-off couple heading to the opera, the woman hiking up her skirts so the filth would not stain her fine peach coloured dress. A shriek as a mop of manure ended up on her white shoes.

A breath came out from his nose, slow, heavy. "_Elle est jeune, __be__lle, __à__ ma surprise.__ Mais maigre. (She is young, beautiful, __to my surprise__. But thin.) _I couldn't believe it when I saw her. She looked absolutely out of place there."

Veronique raised her brows. The crinkle in her forehead matched the lines in her mouth: deep, rippling, expressive. "She's not one of royal bastards shoved away...is she? Being so young and untouched?"

Thomas shook his head. He eyed a lone cloud, wispy and long and it snaked across the sky. More days of heat and dryness would follow, no doubt. The spires of the cathedral cast shadows across the ground, waxing and waning with the sun's movement. He thought he saw a shadow move across the roof near the coloured glass, bouncing like a dandelion's seed in a breeze. His eyes flicked back to the fishwife.

"_Non, _she never struck me as being remotely royal or highborn. She couldn't even be a governesses' daughter, but having anyone vouch for you in the Bastille means someone had _livres _to throw about."

"_Alors, (so) _someone wanted to put her away, but didn't want her to have a ruined hair on her pretty head." Veronique pursed her lips, skin flaking from dryness. A tongue ran over her bottom lip as if to answer that complaint. She bunched her brow again, thinking. "You don't think a Lorraine had something to do with this, do you?"

Thomas thought about it. When the witch had mentioned 'Arracourt', he had figured she was referring to Lorraine nobility, yet she never mentioned any connection to that family. If she had been, public opinion would have condemned her, going as far as to publish her family history down to the great-great-great bastard thrice removed if they wanted to be thorough. There had been none of that.

Thomas did not conceive of asking de Launay about who had sent the witch to the Bastille. It was above his station and beneath de Launay to answer. Since the public could not provide answers for him, he was left as ignorant as the crowds currently enchanted – and frightened - by her.

"That's the thing," Thomas said after a while. "She mentioned working for a Madame d'Arracourt, and that region is in Lorraine. Yet I've never heard or seen a noble use that name before." His nose twitched. He wasn't sure if he needed to sneeze or rub his nose from nervousness or the stench. "It's possible she concocted the whole story in order to fool me, to gain my trust. If she did..."

"_Attente, attente! (Wait, wait!)" _Veronique snapped her fingers. "I _do _know that name." Her eyes went bright with recognition, green and gold flecks swimming around her irises. "There is a young woman, roughly around her age, that attends business at the Hôtel de Ville with that name. She must be no older than this witch of yours!"

Thomas' mouth opened, then closed, in the span of a second. When he frowned, every muscle appeared to cave in around his mouth and chin, giving him the look of a Norse cave troll. It was not an attractive sight, but it accurately reflected his thoughts.

"She's working with _revolutionaries?" _The last part came out in a whisper. While the bustle behind them may be sympathetic to the causes of revolt, Thomas did not want to be stampeded in a fit of defiance. There were those in Paris who still held royalist sympathies; they, too, watched their neighbours for the shuffling of papers, for the patriotic songs sung through dance and drink. Thomas would rather not sing arm-in-arm with his fellow guardsmen just yet.

Veronique shook her head. "No, not just them. I swear I've seen men like Paul Barras with her. She comes in an unmarked coach - a bunch of jumping logs, really – and she'll stay there for the whole afternoon. A very serious looking thing. Strong jaw. Stronger than yours, I might add." Veronique gave a wry grin at Thomas' wince. "But she usually comes on Wednesdays, out from the countryside or wherever. Wears a hood."

"How did you see her face if she wears a hood all the time?" Thomas asked. "You didn't tear it off her head, did you?"

Veronique chuckled. "_Non, mon cheri, _I didn't touch a single hair. She arrived one day with another blond – a Beauharnais, I think – and oh, the talking-to she gave him! You should have seen him sputter! I thought he was going to snap his cane in two, that's how tightly he was holding it. She did not wear a hood that day, and I could see her face – young, fine enough, but with a jaw that tended to wag, like a dog's jaw. Blonde hair, some brown in it. I couldn't see her eyes, so I cannot tell you what colour they were."

"She must be important enough to wrangle with a Beauharnais and Barras," Thomas said. "They usually only speak to women in salons, and Barras has a penchant for widows." He paused. "Wasn't Beauharnais engaged to a woman from Martinique? What's he doing with an unmarried woman while being married?"

"I think this one has quite the reputation. Maybe one as big as theirs, maybe bigger. Paul Barras was nothing until he declared his loyalty towards the Estates General," Veronique said. "Now he walks with a young woman as if she were holding him by a leash. _Non, _let me fix that: _Beauharnais, _that proud man, was the one being dragged by a leash. Can you imagine? I can't."

Thomas watched the river below, its ugly sludge carrying whatever disease and detritus beneath its surface. Maybe, at one point, it had been a clean, shining river, safe to bathe in and swim in when the summers burned hot. That brown sludge, thicker from the tanneries' waste, reminded him of his grave digging work. The difference there was that bodies, after a time, returned to the earth and enriched the soil. Or, if the bodies were to be cremated, glistening white skulls could be placed on racks beneath the catacombs being erected beneath the city. There was a cleanliness involved in preparing those for the afterlife, if there was one. Your fingers turned black, but their bones bleached white. _Le blanc et noir. _

Veronique rested her arms on the stone wall, drumming her fingers. Her bonnet hung by a loose ribbon around her neck, her hair in an unkempt braid. It reminded Thomas of the witch's braid, long and black like an ink spill, shining and clean against her white chemise. He had not seen her in a few days. He wondered how she was, what she was doing to keep herself busy.

The_ poissarde_ put a hand on his shoulder, fingers toying with the frayed threads of his costume, a dark blue as ruined as her dress. They'd been pressed and fancy, once, too. "Be safe. There is talk on the street of a riot."

"There are talks of riots everywhere," Thomas said quietly. "And the soldiers come in and put them down. People bray for blood, but when they see it, they scream and caw and demand some more. All of it ends eventually."

Veronique shook her head, her plaited hair shaking like a horse's tail. "Not this time. The Pitié-Salpêtrière is being eyed, as is _Les Invalides. _I know your father is there."

"What for? All they're going to do is cause injury and anguish to a place full of people too weak to participate in their revolutionary brigade. They can't hope to recruit _there."_

Veronique looked around her, in the cracks and narrow lane ways, surveying every twitch of movement. She leaned towards Thomas' ear. "_Poudre à canon (gunpowder). _That's what they want. And your _petite s__orci__è__re _(little witch) is only giving them ideas."

Thomas found himself chuckling, a throaty rumble that would have been fatherly, had he not been so mellowed by life. "_Petite..._is not the word I'd use. _Femme soldat __(female soldier) _is more appropriate."

"Ah...so she _has_ cast a spell on you." Veronique smiled, a line of broken teeth marring an otherwise plain face. She usually smiled that big when she was entertained. She inclined her head. "She hasn't given you a name?"

"_Non_, no more than you have for our mystery woman from Lorraine."

"Tell you what. You get me a name for our _petite s__orci__è__re, _and I'll give you one for_ la femme myst__é__rieuse (mystery woman).Tope-l__à? (It's a deal?)__"_

" _Tr__è__s bien." _He shook her hand. "I'll see if I can get a name by the end of the week."

"_Parfait! _(Perfect!) I'll see you at the Rue de la Surintendance. _Au revoir_!"

They separated, Veronique crossing the bridge to return to the mainland, Thomas turning towards the Palais de la Cité. There was an artisan there he knew who could give him the sketch paper and charcoal he needed for a drawing he had been aching to do for the past week, not considering the general book of sketches he had been commissioned to do. He had almost forgotten it entirely if not for the image of black silk and white muslin searing through his brain like hot embers on tree sap. Yes, he had to sketch it; had to put it down for appreciation. The records could be falsified, could be contradicted but a sketch was harder to forge, harder to forget.

A sketch was a memory. A point and a place in time. Life for the mysterious, the elusive ones.

He wanted her memory imprinted and sealed, if not for his enjoyment, than for history's need for recollection.

He counted the _livres_ in his hand, coin by coin, not noticing the long shadow following him since he and Veronique stood together next to the river. Neither had known there was someone listening in, hungry and keen for information. For their secrets. Thomas passed by a carriage, unmarked and plain in simple, clean wood, lost in his own artistic thoughts. The man who stepped inside it went unseen, mismatched eyes blazing with knowledge.

The man with mismatched eyes would pay to see that drawing. He would steal it before the artist was even done with the base lines if he had to. But it would be his...and the tide would be in his favour once more.

* * *

_**Notes:**_

\- _**This chapter was inspired by the book, 'Versailles: Biography of a Palace' by Tony Spawford. **_

\- _**'His son is much less ill than the state' was an actual quote uttered at the time of Louis-Joseph's death. **_

_**\- I tried looking up Arracourt, to see if it existed during this time. All I got was that it was really a small area near Lorraine.**_

_**\- The regrat market was a market set up to re-sell food taken from noble households to re-sell at knock-down prices.**_


	5. Métis Autrichien

_**Sorry for the delay, I was focused on other things.**_

_**A little more character development in this one. I fully intend Marceline to be a smarmy bitch, so if she comes off like that (especially to others!) I know I'm on the right track.**_

* * *

_**June 14th**_

For the first hour since returning to her cell, Marceline had dug at her cuticles until her thumbs turned puffy and red. The inside of her lip had been chewed so hard it blistered, her tongue flicking over the sore ridge in her mouth. Two of her pillows had their stuffing spill out like loose flour around her legs, her nails slicing the fabric from her anxiety and adrenaline.

The second hour comes. Then the third. At the fourth hour she became bored and laid on her cot, counting the stones in the ceiling from end to end, noticing holes here and there in the chipped mortar. She crossed one leg over another. She swung a foot and periodically cracked an ankle. She jutted out her lip, looking down and seeing the ugly blister from her anxious worrying of it. She wanted to sigh at the sight of the split, puffy skin and how it marred her appearance, but a blister is the least of her concerns.

Marceline waited for the inevitable storming of her cell with swords drawn from their scabbards and rusted bayonets pointed at her naked throat. Shackles would dangle in their filthy hands, ready to chain her feet and wrists to the stone ring in her cell, leaving her akin to an exposed, writhing caterpillar in need of a leaf to hide under. No more privileges, they will tell her. No more incidences of her running around and alerting the prisoners to her existence. No more treats and letters, and most importantly (!) no more tattling from a young man who wants to know why the Bastille's only female prisoner is poking around the men's cages.

A day passed.

Then two.

Thomas, her jailer, did not arrive for his shifts. She asked the other marshals who visited her where he is, whether something has happened to him. They rolled their shoulders, or frowned, or spared her a sideways glance. None of them answer her; whether it's because they are unused to hearing her speak or unused to seeing her at all she cannot say.

Her blister healed. Her reddened thumbs returned to their white hue. Breakfast, lunch and dinner is delivered and her small bowls of water for cleaning and drinking are taken away without a single suspicious glance thrown her way. She braids and unbraids her hair, watching the light skip across the shards of glass from the broken mirror at the back. Seven years of bad luck, and not enough wood to knock on.

Nothing comes after all those hours of waiting. Marceline watched her cell door, wondering. Unlike the lower cells with open cages, hers was sealed by a wooden door with an iron lock. She was surrounded by an enclosed stone encampment, roomy yet damp with the June heat. Unlike the calottes she cannot hear the whistling wind or the occasional shouts of carriage drivers trying to tame misbehaving horses. She doesn't miss the stench of the Seine and the tanneries, but she does miss how the breeze wrapped around her like a blanket, comforting her in a way no human touch could.

Unlike the rooftop cells, there is only a small opening in the door for the _garde __français__e__s _to peer inside. Aside from Thomas, who would strike up conversations with her, the other guards delivered her supplies without a word to spare. Snaggletooth and Lazy Eye were content enough to hear Thomas' reports, but here and there they'd sneak up to the door, eyes peeking through rusted iron bars to see the s_orci__è__re _sit with her chin on her knees, toying with her loose braid or adjusting the diamond snowflake on her finger. Whenever she looked up to meet their gaze, they'd swiftly walk away, boots thudding down the corridors to harass the men below.

Maybe they learned from the first encounter not to touch things that didn't belong to them. Maybe they stood back and waited for her to rake her claws over some other unfortunate's face. Or, maybe Thomas had convinced them she wasn't all that bad; she just needed to be left alone and treated as if she didn't exist, though it was harder to do than she realized. All her life Marceline revelled and bathed in the attention she received from others, smiling her icy smile and strutting her way down streets a full head (literally and figuratively) among passersby. Now, with the situation reversed, she could not find room to complain. It gave her time to think about her life, her future...an escape, if it was decided by de Launay and her mysterious benefactor that she was to stay here indefinitely.

In a way, Marceline thinks the _ge__ô__lier__s _are covering for her: they rattle the cages of the male prisoners, delay their feedings and refuse to give them their letters. It has been 12 days since she arrived, and the past three days have not settled well among three of the most notorious inmates, with the most vocal and defiant one being the half-breed. One night he protested and argued with the marshals enough that they moved him to another cell in another tower so his provocative attitude could simmer and evaporate like the morning dew under the June sun.

That had been days ago, or so she thought. Marceline was initially confident the prisoners had forgotten her little excursion. But she did not let go of the breath she had been holding for days, because the minute she did, her expectations would fly back in her face like an enraged murder of crows. It was smart of her to do so, because the three she did not want to provoke the most had _not _forgotten, but had simply pushed it to the back of their minds. It was likely they were simply waiting until they gathered enough evidence to convict her, and away from the Bastille she will go.

For now, though, she could not shake the feeling she was not alone in her tower. Like the film that forms when steam meets frosty glass, she could not wipe it away without leaving streaks. So she stops and listens, attentive, and waited for the jailers to go through their rounds.

The marshals came on schedule, bringing food for her as well as any items she requested that morning: the horsehair toothbrush, chewing mint for her breath, some ginger for an upset stomach. She thanks them, making sure to be extra sweet and amiable, even though her extra toothy grin puts the _gardes _on edge rather than please them. When her cell door was closed, she strained her ears for the sound she waited for and yet didn't expect: a second clinking of plates and a muffled grunt as another cell door was opened.

So it was true, then: the half breed _was_ brought to Bazinière Tower as punishment for fighting with the guards. No doubt his mentor was fuming in his cell at his protégé's miscreant behaviour; every hour lost in training will be made up with longer gruelling hours and exercises. If the half breed was pleased with the rest given to his body, he showed no sign of it: he bickers with the guards who promptly threaten to take his rations away. He humphed and accepted his situation without a word.

One night - last night, maybe - Marceline is sure she hears him sigh and mutter to himself about how bored he was and how he wished for writing utensils. Still he tries to communicate with an Élise, and Marceline suspected that this is the woman this man is heartbroken over. She knows the half-breed murdered a noble, but who that noble was she does not know yet. Clearly, the murder held importance to this woman, since the man was trying to reach out to her and mend the bridge he sent crumbling into the river.

It doesn't stop Marceline from wondering why he was placed in the same tower as her. Unlike her, who fought and scratched and would have escaped were it not for the sacks and jute string around her limbs, he was marched to his new cell without a word, smart enough to realize he couldn't bicker his way to a better situation and bitterly content he was only being relocated rather than being tossed off the roof. The only time he spoke was when food was brought to him or when the nights stretched on and his own conversation kept him company.

While she was thankful his love and attention was for another woman, she could not help but suspect the jailers put them together in the hopes they would enjoy some 'action' - mainly, and obviously, sex. They were both young, near the same age, and physically fit, and she being the only female in the prison is an incredible draw. Perhaps they thought the half-breed, lovesick and eager for attention, would see her and be provoked into actions he otherwise might not do.

If de Launay heard about this, though, the entire fortress would come thundering down in the storm of his rage. He is under enough pressure as it is; he needed nor wanted no more scandals and a clandestine, steamy love affair would not help his case in the slightest. The feudal torture chamber would no longer be seen as a force of order and control, but a Gothic brothel mocked in salons across the country. It certainly would cause frenzy among the papers at home and abroad; those pornographic magazines seized by the government would enjoy a surge of new readership with a sultry, nude witch on the front cover.

However, Marceline isn't entirely ungrateful for his company despite the crude matchmaking. From his voice alone (on the occasions when he spoke) the half-breed sounds attractive. Why wouldn't he be? She did not forgot the subtle purr in his voice when he sassed his mentor, how it rolled out and lowered an octave when he became angry. She found his low voice enjoyable and oddly soothing. She hummed to herself whenever she imagined it, even allows herself a girlish giggle. She knew he sparred with his cellmate, the older man with the beard and exposed chest. She remembered the lines like fissures in his forehead, the deep set of his frown as he traced her dust trail in the dark. He is older, sure, but he was not sick either. Both of them are fit and athletic, intelligent and with their wits about them. But the half-breed was the only young one there, and it was not hard to imagine him being a decent lover with the woman he cried out for in the night...

Ah. Foolish thoughts. But she _was _lonely. Even casual conversation would help. Marceline found herself sighing audibly.

In the lower cells there was a man who'd play melodies on his violin. She recognized _La Folia_; it gave her a little trill in her heart whenever she heard it. It reminded her of the time her mother had taken her to the opera, and she, writhing and frustrated for not being able to see over the audience's heads, sat on her mother's lap and let the tune lull her to sleep. The melody reminded her of how her mother stroked her hair, a dark ink against her mother's platinum white hair, as her fitfulness gave way as the music cast her away to another place. While it did not lure her to sleep in her adult years, it eased her mental troubles. It took her back to an easier time, a simpler time.

_Simple, _she mentally scoffed. The irony of that statement was too great to put to paper, let alone words.

Occasionally, she'd hear different tunes from the violinist, some she was surprised to hear. When Marceline was bored, she tended to whistle, and she'd whistle whatever song would be on her mind at the moment. They'd come out horribly out of tune at first, choppy and resembling the squawks from a mother hen, but once she remembered the notes, she could whistle whole three-to-four minute songs without missing a note.

It wasn't an issue, then, that her whistles carried outside and the violinist decided to copy the notes. No doubt the other prisoners were piqued by the new tunes. They weren't on the level of Mozart – nothing could – but, after all, the French took to Mozart's bold new approach, whereas the Austrians stuck up their noses.

Maybe that's what she needed to do now: add some music to fix her boredom. She pursed her lips, thought of a tune, and began to whistle.

She found she couldn't carry a note at first. Not too disappointing - the blister on her lip hadn't entirely healed and her tongue liked to focus on that more. She tried out a few songs she remembered, going with easy tunes at first before moving into more complex ones. Once she thought she had a whole song mapped out, she sputtered, and her little singalong went awry.

She winced at what she heard. It sounded pretty damn awful, and no amount of correction mid-tune would fix it. Her tongue just couldn't get over the little mound of split skin, and it irritated her that this little piece of flesh couldn't obey her brain. Eventually, she blew out a raspberry, and stuck out her tongue.

"_Fils de pute,(Son of a bitch.)" _she muttered. She sighed again, a little on the dramatic side. She tried pursing her lips again, preparing for another practice round, when the conversation she hoped for, yet didn't expect, came slithering into her cell like a snake coiling around her ankle.

"That's not a very nice thing to say."

Marceline thinned her lips, glancing towards the door. She thought she'd been hearing things for a moment, but no, the half-breed is talking – and he's talking _to_ her. How had he managed to hear her mutter in the first place? It was under her breath, barely audible even to her own ears. Her whistling, of course, could be heard – it probably could've been heard outside, what for all the God-awful noises tumbling out of her chapped lips – but not that. He had terrific hearing, or he must've waited until the silence settled before speaking.

"I'm not a nice girl, so don't expect me to say nice things," she said. She tongued her blister again._ Stupid thing._ _If only you obeyed me._

"Oh? Here I thought pretty ladies always had something nice to say." His tone was easy and carefree, like he didn't care – and wouldn't care - about her clipped tone which tried to cloak her surprise.

"Do pretty ladies make men scream as if it was their first name day?" she challenged, seeing the bait and taking it. "Careful. I might take your finger too."

"A pleasant offer, but I'll have to decline. You didn't answer the first part, however."

"First part of what?"

"Whether or not you're a pretty lady."

_You're a charmer, aren't you? _She thought. _I'm sure a lot of women throw themselves at your feet. _

"You don't know what I look like," she said. "So the first part cannot be answered."

"Cannot, or will not?" There was a _slight_ hint of cheekiness, the sort that picks on nuances and exploits them. From the sounds of it, he looked forward to verbal debates like these.

She was candid to entertain him in that endeavour.

"It's neither subjective or objective. You've never seen me, so you can't solve the latter. The former is only based on your imagination, and since you haven't seen me, subjectivity goes as far as your opinion does."

"How very _verbose. _But you're still wrong."

"Oh? Care to tell me?"

"I _have_ seen you. In your nightgown. The day you were brought here, you were tied up in flour sacks. Your chest was exposed – and no, I _didn't _see the part you're thinking of. You're not an old dowager, that's for sure."

She narrowed her eyes at a man who cannot see her. If they were face to face, she wouldn't so much as bat her eyes; a game face was the way to go, all cold steel and immovable. Since she cannot be judged, she is free to make as many faces as she likes.

She mentally confesses he is already starting to irritate her. The ease with which he enters conversation and how quick he finds faults is impressive and revealing.

He noted her pause, and she thought she could sense a smile. "You're not saying much. Did I offend you?"

"You're a clever one," Marceline conceded. "Can you deduce my age?"

"I thought it was impolite to ask a woman's age."

"Only to dowagers selling their daughter's maidenheads," she said. "Go ahead, take a guess."

He hummed to himself, thinking. "From the sounds of it, you're probably not even out of your maiden years." He paused. "Are you even an adult?"

Marceline laughed at that. She laughed a long, hearty one, and it surprised her new cellmate as much as it did her. She finished it in a dramatic gasp.

"No," she said. "I'm legal."

"Legal?"

"I'm above eighteen. I'm twenty."

"Ah, so you _are_ near my age."

"Are you surprised a fair maiden like me is in the Bastille?" She slipped her fingers through the bars, peering through her tiny window. She didn't know where the half-breed was, and his voice echoed off the mortar which made it difficult to pinpoint. She blew a piece of hair out of her face.

"There's a clue," he said instead. "You're fair skinned."

"I thought you said you saw my chest. You'd know my décolletage showed my sternum."

"Must've forgot."

"Short memory you have." She smirked. "Must not be skilled in the observational department."

There was an aggravated humph, followed by footsteps. Clearly, he was trying to get her in his field of view so he could have an easier time skewering her.

Let him, Marceline thinks. This was the most fun she's had in days. He challenged her first, after all.

"Are you insulting me?" It sounded more like a statement than a question. "To think I wanted a pleasant conversation with a member of the fairer sex."

"I told you I wasn't a nice girl," she singsonged with sugary sweetness. At least, she intended it to. Instead, it comes out mocking and harsh, the sugar turned to acid with a single curl of her tongue. "So that was your first mistake." She smiled to herself, her incisors showing through her lip. A dear shame he couldn't see them.

"You're wrong again."

She paused. He was unperturbed and there is a lilt of smugness in his tone, like he knew something she didn't. She slipped her fingers away from the bars and curled them at her hips. "On what?"

"I didn't make a mistake here. _You_ did. I'm only here because of you."

"You're _here_ because you started a bitch fight with the guards," she spat. "Who's at fault, again?"

"It's still you," he said. "Because if you hadn't sneaked into the Liberté tower I wouldn't be here, talking to you. You'd still be a ghost. Now that I know what you sound like...," he drew it out like pulling a loose thread from an ill-sewn shirt, enjoying the sight of the fabric falling apart in front of him. "...that's not easily forgettable. Young and haughty. You're not a dowager's daughter yourself, are you? It'd be _terribly_ ironic if you were."

_Oh you are **good**. Goddamnit. _And he has to be good, of course he is, because her flip-flopping veneer is blatantly obvious to someone paying close attention, and he was someone who picked up on the slightest change in someone's inflection. Her veneer gives way to a steadier emotion: irritation. However, she isn't stupid enough to let it bubble to the surface and show him that he's won; she let it roll around in her mouth and throat, letting it overpower the taste of blood in her cheek.

Another idea comes to her, one that could be considered cheap and dirty, but she wagered the half-breed wasn't averse to using the same tactics himself. So, she puts the idea to words.

"It takes a bit of bribery and money to get a place in the Bastille," she started, "and being a dowager's daughter would be a nice package for de Launay. Unfortunately, though...I'm not a dowager's daughter. Even if I was, it's still better than being charged with the murder of a member of the First Estate."

She let it sink in, letting the insults flow out of her as her anger was replaced with his own. She can feel the change in the air, the way the pauses are prolonged and where exhaled air comes out in aggressive, choppy movements.

"I am _not_...," he growled, "a _murderer_. And you are one to talk. Who the Hell put you in here, anyways? Did you chew off a man's cock after you were done with his fingers?"

She smothered her mouth to suppress her giggles. _Look who's turned the tables. _

"_Pardonnez-moi," _she said after the giggles pass, "but...that's what you're in here for, isn't it? Murder? How did you do it? Did you stab him in the back, or did you watch his eyes go black when you plunged your sword in his gut?"

She heard his muted cry of rage. "Come here and say that, _salope (bitch)!"_

"That's not a very nice thing to say! I thought gentlemen always minded their manners!"

If he was ready to unleash a hailstorm of insults at her, Marceline did not get a chance to hear it. Her cell door suddenly rattled and unlocks, and there stood the cook, Henri, eyeing her with a disapproving face.

It was obvious he heard the whole encounter. His eyes were half lidded, jaw firm and set. It also looked like he was fresh from the kitchen: there was flour and soup stains on his apron, and his sheared head glistened with sweat. He shook his head at her.

"Troublemakers, the both of you," he muttered. "If I didn't know better, you were _les limiers (bloodhounds)." _He stepped aside and into the corridor, tilting his head when she did not follow straightaway.

Marceline blinked at this development. "Wait. Where are we going? Are you taking me back to the calottes?"

"You deserve it," she heard the half-breed say. She was about to give a sarcastic retort of her own, when the cook shook his head again.

"_Non. _I have a better use for you, and it doesn't involve you enraging the _métis Autrichien." _He motioned for her to follow him outside, eager to quell the fight.

She was hesitant, more so because the half-breed would be waiting to get a glimpse of her face and her body so he could continue his fight. She entwined her fingers, eyes flicking in both directions before settling on the cook.

"Ah...where is the _métis Autrichie__n? _I don't want to -"

"What, have him see you?" the cook cut her off. "Too late."

The cook moved to her right flank besides, and with a brisk pace they make it to the exit. Marceline kept her eyes forward, not too bold and not too meek, and didn't think about looking to her right. The cook had moved there for a reason; as it turned out, the half-breed was on the right side of the cell block, and only the stone corner blocked him from view.

Marceline could _feel_ his penetrating gaze at her back, hooking into her skin like a harpoon on a whale's hide. Her teeth poke at her blister again, and the taste of copper fills her mouth. It felt like his gaze was magnetic, drawing her back to her starting point so they can resume a fight with no clear solution. She wanted to feel bad – she _did _act poorly and the man had not been cruel to her - but she couldn't. And she wouldn't. A sense of smug self-fulfillment slithered through her veins, and once she and the cook enter the courtyard, she was nearly skipping with excitement.

The half-breed tried to cheat, and she cheated him. Now round two would commence. One part of her curiosity had been sated, and some of that wit she'd enjoyed hearing had been heaped on her plate, but there was still more to test, to discover. Who would be the victor in this new game of theirs? Who would get tired first?

So long as de Launay didn't become aware of the situation, it was anyone's game.


	6. Conquête de la Normande Pt I

_**A few in-game characters are named dropped, some explicitly, some note. You will know who they are. **_

* * *

He overheard once they are called 'The Crows', a group of men and one woman dressed in black with hoods pulled low over their faces like the curled plume of nightshade.

Whenever Thomas had difficulty remembering, it came back to him like the thud of hailstones against glass: once, in a visit to the Hôtel de Ville to discuss a petition with his lawyer, he saw a young woman in the foyer, pacing on the parquet floors with her boots caked with dry mud. She wore a dark cloak with her periwinkle peasant's farm dress peeking out underneath that swished with her impatient feet. When the door opened and a valet arrived to announce a new arrival, an enormous man came thundering in, the servants rushing to keep up with him and passersby leaping to get out of the way. The young woman stopped pacing, unconcerned with the reactions of the others, and turned with her back to Thomas, speaking to the larger man. He could not tell if they were father and daughter or uncle or niece.

They, too, had been dressed in black but unlike these 'Crows' they carried a different aura about them: instead of the nefarious, covert nature these hooded people logged about, they held a confident, domineering presence which both drew attention and made them aloof in the eyes of others. When they walked down the hall to where the Crows were meeting, they walked side by side as equals as if sex and class made no difference to them. One of the Crows, a man with a white beard and a cross hanging low on his chest, turned quickly at the sight of them, ushering the rest into a room before the couple made it across the threshold.

Thomas had not meant to eavesdrop or listen to the pair speak in excited, hushed tones as they approached the now-closed door, but sitting in a chair with the upholstery coming apart and with fetid smells worse on the inside than the outside, it was a needed distraction. Interesting people made interesting art subjects, and already his fingers were caked in ink with his newly bought English metal pen scraping across the pages.

He did not forget their brooches of black eagles with ribbon red tongues and black crosses dangling from golden talons on the lapels of their waistcoats. The Crows, in contrast, covered their necks with scarves or cravats, with the lone woman baring hers with a necklace dangling down to her bosom. Her cross was a simple silver, whereas the crosses belonging to the giant man and his daughter (or niece, Thomas didn't know), were worn openly and with extravagance. Were this a conspiracy, meeting at the Hôtel de Ville wasn't very discreet – not with all the subtle pomp and closed doors.

He thought then it wouldn't have affected him. He was there for a simple petition which required his signature and off he would go for a job interview in an ever shrinking market. He was literate, he could work with his hands, and he still had his strength. Someone had to have work for him, somewhere...

Minutes passed. Hours. Then the door of the meeting room opened and out came the two female Crows. One had her hair braided with entwined daisies, a headband keeping the errant strands tame atop her head. Her black gloves of lace went up to her elbows, pulled here and there by dainty fingers to fix the creases. Her dress was a forget-me-not blue, the stomacher and petticoats an ivory white. Beside her, the hooded woman with muddied boots had bared hands with short, if not broken, fingernails and what looked like a blister on her left thumb. The class differences were obvious and they did not speak as if they were utter strangers to each other; as if each other's presence was abhorrent and not worth recognizing.

The men followed behind with a red-headed man looking manic like a stray, rabid dog and the elder man with the white beard keeping his gaze to the floor. Thomas couldn't understand why, until the red-headed man yelped when the monstrous man thrust him to the side and almost into a nearby statue. The glower the man gave him was defiant, but it quickly turned into that of a terrified mutt once the taller man glared over his shoulder.

There Thomas could discern the stranger's features, and while the man was by no means unpleasant to look at, he cast a terrible pall over those who encountered him. Well over six feet tall, the man had close cropped dark grey hair with salt-and-pepper stubble covering his powerful jaw. The nose was long and prominent, the cheeks smooth and full despite the man's middle age. The forehead was prominent, the legs powerful and thick from horse-riding or years of military service. Wherever he walked, only the young woman with the periwinkle dress was not afraid of his energy or his presence. The lone noble female Crow danced to the side as he approached, watching him uneasily as he made his way down the hall. The black eagle bounced on the lapel of his coat. Thomas knew at first glance it was the Prussian coat-of-arms.

Was that why the Crows, these strange people, were so afraid? It would be an easy answer for Prussia and France were not allies and likely would not be in the foreseeable future. As it turned out, the easiest answer was the most incorrect one and the most simplistic in light of the truth.

How foolish he was, and how foolish he was now that he could not interpret the knowing, piercing glance of the huge Prussian man, grey eyes distant and menacing like approaching winter clouds. He could still hear the _clap_ of his polished leather boots on the freshly cleaned floors and the snap of his long black coat, coupled with the skip of the young woman behind him with the tapping of her dirtied heels. A glance, a mere glance was spared to the sketch he was working on, a muse of his which had bothered him the whole week and whose attention had enraptured Thomas – well, _almost_ enraptured.

The Prussian did not stop but slowed his pace to a cautious stroll. He watched Thomas over his shoulder, never looking away even as valets and servants rushed to press themselves against statues to avoid his judging glare. Thomas kept his gaze lowered for modesty's sake, but he did not understand why this man was paying attention to him. He was beneath him in class and station and his clothing showed his economic situation. What good could he serve? He wasn't looking for a confrontation, and he did not want to get involved with the affairs of people who very likely did not mean well. He couldn't afford it with _livres_ for one, and his life wasn't worth that much to risk it, either.

The huge man eventually broke eye contact, turning to his young companion, who'd since matched his pace, and spoke to her. She, too, cast him a glance but he did not commit her face to memory. While the other female Crow had her face uncovered, all Thomas could see of this woman was a splotch of freckles near the chin and a pair of blonde braids.

They left the building and Thomas was left alone – or so he thought. He did not see the Crows leave; it was likely they took an alternative route or simply decided to leave individually without drawing attention. He simply thought he'd never see them again. He would have liked to admit he didn't want to; to return to his meagre life and hope things would go smoothly for him.

What he could not, and cannot, admit now was that he liked being embroiled in the one currently sucking him in like a vat of wet mud. Conspiracies were fun to read about and were meant to be enjoyed in the comforts of a salon, with Saint-Domingue sugar cubes and _les régals à gloire _in fine china mugs; they are infinitesimal at first before bursting forth with all intensity and constricting power.

The conspiracy Thomas didn't think he'd ever be involved in started with an accidental encounter.

He sometimes regretted ever showing his artistic skills, but there was no saying 'no' to a 14-year-old Thérése Cabarrus.

* * *

The July of 1788 was uneventful for him until that summer. Unusual weather had marked the past five years, with unseasonably cold winters, dry summers, and occasional heatwaves which ruined the harvest in the autumn. The soil was either too wet or too dry, and the peasantry suffered all the more for it. His trips to the countryside were nonexistent, but when he had to attend familial matters, the bare subsistence the people endured were enough to turn his heart to ash. It was a hard sight to see.

Days prior, a horrific hailstorm whipped through the capital and the countryside, sending hailstones through windows and onto exposed heads. Untold profits were lost from dead cattle and livestock, and horses were felled in the street. Others died when the tennis ball sized hailstones thumped onto their heads. After a break in the storm, Thomas wandered through the Marais district on business in his father's stead, and sat on a bench observing the damage when the debris needed to be cleared from the streets.

In his bag, he had a simple sketchbook and drawing utensils and began to sketch what he saw. He had time to spare. One of these subjects which so caught his eye was a young woman standing next to an overturned carriage, whispering sweet things to the horses which had slipped on a few errant hailstones and were snorting in pain. One of them managed to get up on teetering legs, but the other's situation was grave. A leg had been crushed beneath the carriage's weight, and blood had started to leak into the wood. Its painful snorts became whinier and whinier as people tried to move the weight off its leg. It was clear it had to be put out of its misery. Despite being faced with such a decision, the woman accepted the situation with grace and severity.

He sketched her kneeling there besides the animal, a pale hand stroking its forehead paused for a moment in time. He caught the serenity of her face, the drying tears on skin once sun-kissed. It was a major contrast to the wild-eyed, panicked stare of the animal. The ripples of her dress, the light dancing of the feather in her bonnet, the hair falling loose onto her cheek, all of it made for a perfect, albeit solemn and chaotic moment.

In the silent air, the young woman looked up. Thomas was too busy in his work to notice her approach, and he was startled when she sat beside him and started speaking.

"Who taught you how to draw?" she asked, watching as he resumed sketching. He was filling in the details now, adding shade where it was needed and cross-hatching in other areas. If she was offended at him ignoring her, she didn't show it. In fact, she seemed quite enamoured with his work.

Maybe she simply appreciated a quiet, solemn man alone who didn't ask many questions and was easy to speak to.

"Myself," Thomas replied. "I didn't have enough money to study at the art institutes."

"Oh, _quel dommage_ (What a shame). But you are very good, _monsieur_. You managed to capture my likeness better than the men my father commissions to paint my portraits, and I'm sitting still for _hours _with those." She shook her head. A few curls came loose, bouncing in front of her long eyelashes.

If he was young he would have blushed, but when he was young he scarcely earned the attentions of women. He earned them now not because of his appearance, but because he never denigrated them. Still. A 14-year-old noble shouldn't speak to him so freely.

"You flatter me, _mademoiselle,"_ he said quietly. "I hope I have not offended you in capturing your likeness?"

Thérése laughed. It was light and serene with underlying maturity; not the laughter of a frivolous girl keen on simple excitements. She took the horse's death well all things considering. Perhaps she'd seen plenty die in her youth. It wasn't a secret many were felled as soon as they broke their legs or collapsed from hard riding. It was a part of pastoral life and Parisian life. Life was, for the most part, worthless.

She smiled at him, her thick, brown Spanish hair coming undone from beneath her bonnet. "Not at all! I quite appreciate it, really. I'm used to posing for stuck up, stuffy artists who can't hold a decent conversation. Though I confess I've never seen an artist sketch so quickly and capture the environment so well. Do you mind if I watch you for a minute?"

"_Non, _go ahead_. _But I cannot stay for long – I am only sitting here until the street is cleared. I have business in Marais," Thomas explained.

"Is that so?" Thérése asked. "Well, in exchange for you capturing my likeness so beautifully and with such skill, why don't I take you there? You can accompany me in my carriage. You're a well-behaved man, so I know you won't say anything rude to me or to my friends. Will you accept, _monsieur?_"

Thomas paused while shading in the horse's flanks. He bit the inside of his cheek. He wasn't a completely unlearned man, and he knew what would happen if he refused a noble like Thérése Cabarrus. _Diable_, he could be whipped or burned with hot iron if Thérése decided she did not like the way he was drawing her and viewed it as an affront to her image (Thomas had been approached, anonymously of course, to draw lewd portraits of the Princesses of the Blood engaged in dramatic encounters with animals of varying sizes and endowments). But, as it turned out, Thérése was more level headed than Thomas imagined, and considering she was sitting next to him – a man far below her station and her means – and speaking to him as if both of those things didn't matter, maybe it was an extension of gratitude. Just a mere token of the heart.

Still. It would be rude to refuse, and Thomas was short on money. "If it pleases you," Thomas said finally.

"It will." Thérése beamed at him. "And there are people, I think, who would be pleased with your skills as well."

That conversation would lead him to the Hôtel de Ville one year later, in the same seat, and in the same room.

* * *

**June 14th, 1789**

Thomas was surprised when a messenger boy ran up to him at the gates of the Hôtel des Invalides and plopped a letter in his hand, breathless and dancing on the heels of his feet. The child didn't look older than eleven or twelve and was a ragged if not wretched thing. His hair, if cleaned, would be wispy and thin like river weeds, but with grease and soot caked in his scalp it resembled a seabird stuck in oil. He felt pity upon seeing his clothes: the too-tight shoes, the _culottes _with patchwork repairs. He was tempted to offer him a _livre, _one he didn't have the right to give away, when the boy looked at him and went, "Well?"

"Well, what?" Thomas asked, taken aback. He stared at the boy, watched him continue to hop on his soles impatiently, as if the youth had somewhere else to be and Thomas was wasting his time with his useless questions.

"Aren't you going to open it? I was told to deliver it to you post-haste."

"Post-haste for what? Who sent you?"

"Just open the letter, _monsieur_," the boy said, exasperated. "I have other letters to deliver, _maintenant, dépêche-toi! (Now, hurry up!)"_

Thomas sighed dramatically, throwing his hands up in the air as the boy promptly turned on his heel and sprinted away. The satchel he carried around his shoulders bounced at his stride, and Thomas hoped the boy wouldn't lose the letters he so needed to deliver _post haste. _Gah. The nerve!

However, his own curiosity took over. The letter had no seal, but was tied together with simple red yarn, frayed at the ends as if someone had used it previously. Thomas had to raise a brow at that. Had the letter been tampered with, or was the boy serious when he said he needed to deliver the letter _post haste_? It seemed to be the latter, and when Thomas opened the flap and peeked inside, there was a note with enamelled edges with a black cross in the top right corner and a black eagle on the left.

Both brows were raised when he spotted it. The eagle had a red, elongated tongue with a gold crown atop its head, the coat-of-arms of France's rival, Prussia. When he held the note close to his nose, he caught a whiff of what he thought was a woman's perfume – rosewater - overlaid with a twinge of smoked bark. On the ivory tinted paper was handwriting not exactly neat – in a child's hand, almost – and briskly jotted, the 'ts' and 's's sharp and cutting into the stiff paper.

It read:

_Monsieur Thomas,_

_Yes, it is I. I require your services again. Your artbook of the subjects I commissioned was fantastically done, and my uncle was most pleased when he viewed the drawings himself. He has offered to pay you ahead of time, and double, if you are able to draw a subject much on his mind._

_There is a catch – the commission must be completed promptly, within the next 72 hours. I will be at the Palais du Luxembourg this afternoon. Go to the entrance hall and speak to a man named Dietrich. His French name is Jules – he will know who you are when you call him by this name. He will take you to my quarters. _

_Unfortunately, I will not be alone as I have been the previous times we have met. I am meeting with an associate who has begged me for a meeting and my refusal was impossible in light of his persistence. Wait in the hall until you are called. I assure you, you services will be rewarded, and I have already informed de Launay of the reasons for your absence. Your lost wages will be reimbursed. _

_Make haste as soon as you receive this letter. Whatever it costs you for a carriage, I will reimburse you for that as well. Arrive safely. I cannot rely on anyone else but you._

_\- AA_

A thin and reedy breath escaped Thomas' chapped lips. A commission in 72 hours...it wasn't impossible, and he could complete quick sketches in hours if he had the time, but time wasn't what he had as of late. Aside from his missed shifts at the Bastille, the political situation with the Estates-General and the dissenting priests and Mirabeau's radical speeches and all the riffraff over that, coupled with the increased security at the Hôtel des Invalides made leisure and spare time difficult. Under all the pressure Thomas felt like he was a tiny boat in the middle of a great wave about to be splintered by the powerful waters.

He couldn't refuse this request, and to be honest, he didn't want to. He wanted and needed more money, what with a sudden surgery being scheduled for his father's leg – the good one – turning gangrenous and infections resulting from that. There was also a need to soothe his mind. Grave-digging was a sedate affair and while he was appreciated for that gruesome task it wasn't one he wanted to be known for. Truth be told, the licentious de Sade had rubbed off on him. He wanted something glorious to be remembered by. He wasn't a writer and oil painting was out of the question. Sketching, therefore, offered him a mental and monetary peace.

He would be a hypocrite if he said this affair didn't put him in better straits.

He hailed a carriage which took him to the Palais du Luxembourg. He passed Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame, watching the shadows of both Gothic cathedrals grow long in the afternoon light. Traffic was heavy, both carriage and on foot, and when the throngs of people became too thick Thomas paid the driver with what he had and made the rest of the way on foot.

The Palais fared no better. The streets outside were crammed with people, peasants hawking items at hastily set up stalls and women forming huge groups where they bickered and shouted at rival groups of men over politics. When the men looked like they were going to raise their hands to the women, a gang of _poissardes _emerged, fish knives glittering against their massive thighs, and it promptly put an end to that. For now.

A few _gendarmeries _milled around the gates, warily eyeing the crowds and hoping there wouldn't be a riot. It looked like these people were evicted from the gardens earlier, and if Thomas could ascertain anything from the boisterous, angry conversations, they were evicted for protesting something or other in favour of the Estates-General. Inside the courtyard proper there were few people, and inside the building itself there was no telling if there was anyone inside.

Thomas knew approaching the _gendarmeries_ directly would cause a scene. He spotted one mingling by himself near one of the adjacent buildings. He made his way through the crowd, hugging his satchel close to his person. He didn't have much in the way of coins, but being robbed in this kind of situation would be a real damper on his mood. Luckily, he found the _gendarme_ without incident.

"_Excusez-moi monsieur, _but I have an appointment inside the palace. Could you help me get inside?"

The _gendarmes_, a man not much younger than him with freshly laundered clothes eyed him suspiciously. "How do I know you're not trying to sneak in and open the gates from the inside?"

"I'm here to meet a man named Jules," Thomas said. "I received a letter and it told me to ask after this man. Could you go in my stead and look for him?"

The man rolled his eyes. "_Tr__è__s bien. _Wait here by the gate. If I see the crowd get rowdier, I know who to blame."

Thomas leaned against the gate as he was told. He watched the crowd as it swayed back and forth like a moving school of fish, cloth, leather and steel melting together like scales. Women would throw pamphlets up in the air, demanding compensation for lost property or for proper representation. More demanded bread, shouting how there was not enough grain to go around and how they suspected the nobles were hoarding it. One group looked to be overtly suspicious: the most prominent figure among them was a woman in a blue riding habit, tattered petticoats and a wide-brimmed hat with a bright red feather hanging off the rim. She waved around a flintlock pistol, rallying the other women next to her and calling for a proper demonstration on the palace.

For a moment, Thomas caught her attention. Though they were quite the distance from each other, Thomas could see the woman's mouth move. Her face was hard, but not with cruelty or condemnation of him. She held a curious stare with him, her dirtied cheeks stilled and the flintlock pistol close against her chest. He thought she would come over and speak to him, this lonely _fossoyeur _on business he had yet to know about. Once this strange firebrand decided he wasn't a threat, she did indeed begin to make her way towards him, slithering through the crowd with ease, a group of now quieted women behind him.

Before this flintlock-bearing woman and a gravedigger could strike up a conversation, the _gendarme_ was at his side, breathless like the messenger boy he met earlier.

"Right this way, _monsieur. _They're expecting you."

Thomas didn't look behind him. He followed the _gendarme_ obediently, hoping he wouldn't be splayed like a gutted fish once he came out. He tightened his grip on his satchel, hoping for the best. If he had a rosary, he'd pray. But Thomas wasn't a particularly religious man, and this wasn't a good place to beg God for favours.

He had to play it safe, and hope his skills worked out in the end.

* * *

The inside of the Luxembourg palace, with its chandeliers, painted ceilings and red carpets which stretched from end to end, was majestic. But it was, for the first time in many years, nearly empty. Parisians had free reign of the gardens until recently, and the sudden evictions of them from an everyday activity, combined with everything else happening in the capital, was bound to kick up a fuss. He could still hear the brays of the angry crowd outside, but within the empty hallways it sounded like the buzz of angry bees.

The man he was supposed to meet, Jules, was standing in the foyer. Thomas knew at first glance this man was not French. From the letter his true name was 'Dietrich', and said Dietrich was almost as imposing as the Prussian he'd seen with the Crows: while not as tall, he was exceptionally well built, with a wiry frame and a spryness about him Thomas instantly disliked. The typical Germanic features were all there: blue eyes, hard jaw, sculpted cheeks, and a smattering of blond hair hidden beneath his hat. 'Jules' did not smile when he saw Thomas, but nodded once and motioned for him to follow him.

Thomas spent more time eyeing the paintings on the ceiling and feeling the musty carpet beneath his thin boots. It'd been some time since _f__ê__tes_ were thrown here. He almost thought he could smell and see the hair powder floating in the room like the dust motes from the open windows; hear the music of violins and laughter of nobles as they danced and drank the nights away. They passed the _Salle des Conf__é__rences _with all its gilded gold and Delacroix paintings. All this time, Jules did not speak.

They eventually reached the door to the palace's trophy room. Outside, a few chairs had been set up for visitors, and in one of them Thomas noticed a young girl, 13 or 14 or so, with a mess of dark red hair playing with a ball of yarn in her hands. Jules cleared his throat. The girl looked up.

The girl was the definition of 'mousy', with a pert nose, small mouth, and dark chocolate eyes which spoke of timidness. When she stood, Thomas thought he noticed how her legs were bowlegged.

"Tell the _madamoiselle_ her guest has arrived,_ s'il te pla__î__t."_

"_Un moment, monsieur. _She is speaking with her guest and will need at least five minutes before I can announce the newcomer's arrival."

"As you wish." Jules regarded Thomas a moment. "I'll be waiting in the foyer until you are finished. Félicie will guide you out."

Before Thomas could say anything, Jules turned on his heel and marched away. He shrugged his shoulders and sat on the chair across from the girl, staring at his hands.

It was not even a minute until Thomas could hear voices on the inside.

"...I must confess I am a bit taken aback by this. I did not expect your branch of the Rite to become so interested in ours."

The voice was masculine, easy and rolling with expert dictation. If the man was truly taken aback, he hid it well. His controlled timbre gave the indication he was used to fearsome debates and used to coming out on top.

A female voice responded, "My uncle has decided the French Rite has become too mercurial and – shall we say? - _loose_ in its goals. The death of de la Serre has not made things easier. You are aware he wanted a truce with the Brotherhood, correct?"

The man humphed. "de la Serre was a misplaced cog in the machine. The Rite will move forward without him."

"You are lucky the Brotherhood is as incompetent as the Rite at this moment," the woman shot back. "Were this during the days of de Molay, his men would have never scattered their resources as effective as they did."

"You do not have to remind me," the man responded coolly. "We are not blessed with men like Kenway anymore – and a peaceful sleep to him all the same. Nonetheless, you do not need to worry about the Brotherhood. After all, if your Uncle has his way, they'll be exterminated like the Prussian Brotherhood - an event, I must say, was quite effective. I hear the Assassins still carry nightmares over those executions."

The woman was silent. The man continued, "By the way, I am curious. You are a member of _my_ Rite, are you not? Your loyalties are stronger to the Prussian Rite. Is it not fair to accuse you of having dual loyalty? How am I to believe your motives are for the betterment of our Rite, when your respect is for another?"

There was a sound of a heel twisting on parquet floors. Another foot was stomped down for emphasis. "I am a Knight Hospitaller. I was born into the Rite, yes, but I am a mediator. Remember, Germain, that _I_ am the one who is the canary on your shoulder. You have no eyes in Paris. I have every Assassin and their profile on my desk. You do not. Now, _you_ tell _me_ who has the strongest loyalties!"

The young girl, Félicie put her ball of yarn on the chair next to her. She stood up and moved to the door. Before she knocked, however, she turned to Thomas.

"Can you keep a secret?" she asked.

Thomas raised his brows. After everything he heard...could he? Was he even _meant_ to hear all that? He wagered no, but nonetheless it was illuminating. Who _were_ these people?

Félicie continued, "Pretend you heard nothing. Keep your head down and nod like an idiot. They may not believe you but they will respect your honesty. It will prevent the moving shadows from knocking on your door at night."

Moving shadows? What on Earth - ?

No time to think about that, since Félicie began lightly rapping the door with her knuckles. The impatient, tapping heels paused and clicked to the door. The woman who had been arguing with the man peeked out of the slit in the door. Thomas could see a flicker of braided hair and the smidgen of a periwinkle dress. So. This was the second female Crow. Who was the other one?

Félicie stood behind him, lightly pushing at his back. "It will be fine, _monsieur_. Just act like an idiot, like I said. If Adrienne asked for you personally it usually means she respects you. _Bon chance!"_

_Nom de Dieu. _Was it too much to ask for a cognac?


	7. Conquête de la Normande Pt II

_**I am so sorry for the delay. This chapter was mostly filler and I think it's a garbage-heap, but I didn't want to give a half-assed job.**_

_**There is a Game of Thrones reference in this chapter, as well as a few nods to 'Knightfall'. **_

_**A 'dogie' is a baby cow. A divineress is a real term, it's a fancy way of referring to a fortune-teller or palm reader.**_

* * *

When Adrienne D'Arracourt announced '_I have every Assassin and their profile on my desk' _with the heel of a leather boot layered in sheepskin hammering into the floor with all the finality of the gavel hitting the block, she wasn't lying one bit – and she has a _fossoyeur _to thank for the bragging rights.

For Thomas, stunned as he is now, he isn't sure he should be saying, '_De riens.'_

Less than a year ago, the woman known as _Madamoiselle _D'Arracourt, niece of a Prussian Margrave of the House of Hohenzollern and Knight Hospitaller, was known only by her initials of 'A.A'. Thomas hadn't an inkling of her appearance, her personality or eminence, the mystery of her identity swirling around him like silt in pond water. He didn't know where she stood in France's social strata, let alone if her Hohenzollern blood diluted her French lineage. Hell, he wasn't even sure if she was a _woman_ had the scrawl in her letters not given it away. Though _la sorci__é__re_ told him she owned a château in the countryside, knowledge of the grasp of her reach eluded him. Only when he confronted her in her faded periwinkle dress, wool socks entwined with knitted red roses and honey blonde hair tied in tight braids in the Palais de Luxembourg on a dry June morning could he put his expectations aside and swallow the reality like bitter medicine.

Adrienne D'Arracourt had the wealth of landed gentry, surpassing that of the Princes and Princesses of the blood and had direct military contracts courtesy of her (now deceased) male family members. L_a sorci__é__re_ told him she worked for the Assembly in the same way the Comte de Mirabeau did, although Thomas and by extension Veronique, who overheard the gossip in the markets, hadn't heard a smidgen about a blonde-haired Norman stalking the halls and haranguing the Third Estate. He'd gotten some tips about a 'strong-jawed' woman harassing a Beauharnais and pulling the ear of Paul Barras (literally, Veronique had said, she'd winced as much as Barras did when she watched it happen) in the gardens of Versailles, but the leads ended there. Now the knots were becoming disentangled, their tight binds wrapping around his ankles instead.

He hadn't even considered she was a Crow in totality but in name only: he figured she wore the cloak as a guest of some hidden high society, out of the way and secretive like one of the many cults bursting forth like an overflowing pitch barrel in the damp, dripping underground Parisian catacombs. The men and women of the black cloaks gave off the impression no mere plebeians could ever hope to penetrate, let alone understand, their social circle. The mighty Prussian he saw that day served as a mighty vanguard to said circles, keeping Thomas in place with his grey eyes like the smoke of wildfire. It was impossible to shove down the memory and beat it into the grooves of forgetfulness, for it felt like he crossed the Rubicon in a shanty boat, with the green grass on the other side too luscious to ignore.

Ah, human curiosity. A killer as much as a saviour. Today it was in the form of a woman in country dress _sans bonnet_ and a man in finer, well-pressed clothing with mismatched eyes and his dark, natural hair tied back in a short ponytail. His vest and waistcoat were the same shade of teal, with a white cravat and sleeves fluttering around his hands. There were scars there, healed over gorges of split skin where metal or burns sliced, and then cauterized, the flesh. The buckles on his shoes were a fine silver, likely plucked out of the Melle silver mine itself. The heels on his shoes were around 2-3 inches, putting him near six feet in height. Even without them, Thomas could tell this man would've dominated him. Though not large in frame or muscle mass, the man was assertive without being haughty, as if he knew he was better than his rivals without having to show for it.

Thomas had not seen this man before, but another black cloak was draped over a chair – neatly, finely, without a single crease. With her own black cloak tossed over a couch in the corner, dust and filth caked on the bottom and visible tears off the shoulders, D'arracourt fit the neat, insignificant role of an out-of-country farm girl, awed and displaced in the city which crushed her brethren with crippling poverty and emaciation.

"Ah, there is _le fossoyeur (the gravedigger). _Did I ever tell you, François, this man can sketch an entire person in ink in under an hour, even while sitting in the dark? He _memorizes _them. _Incroyable, n'est __ç__e pas?"_

She announced him with a waving hand, blonde hair catching in the light and her eyes half-lidded in satisfaction, expecting her male companion to think the show was grand when he likely thought it a farce. He didn't bow, didn't say hello, but put his left hand near his heart, tapping it in a form of greeting.

Thomas gave a slight bow in return, saying, "_Madamoiselle _is very kind to me with her patronage."

"_C'est bien peu dire (That's an understatement). _He's never failed me, and I will show you I mean everything I say when you see those Assassins on paper, staring at you in the face."

The newly named François hummed, but whether it was in interest or to placate Adrienne was unknown. "But not with paints?" he asked. An eyebrow was raised at the edge, a subtle movement. It gave nothing away and yet showed everything.

Thomas didn't answer at first. He kept his eyes low, demure. Adrienne tittered. Her toes tapped the floor with a _clack clack, _cutting through the late morning din. Dust motes fluttered around a thick heel.

"Speak up," she barked. _"_Don't be miserable as a dogie with a lost mother. It would be impolite for you not to answer, and _Monsieur _François does not like to waste his time with ingrates."

"_Non, _I have no skill with paints," Thomas said quickly, meek as a battered hound looking at the mismatched eyes. They scrutinized him head to toe and spine to tail bone, a trait second nature to a man with insatiable desires and a personality to match. "I am better with inks, and it's cheaper for me to use them. I only have to focus on shades, not colours. Production is...easier," he finished quietly.

"I see...," François inclined his head at him, the light dancing across his blue and brown irises, before turning back to Adrienne. "What about this one subject you kept speaking about? The one who condemned that playwright to death."

"_Oui." _She looked at Thomas, sticking out her hand. "Give me the sketchbook. I know you said you kept the portrait in a small glass frame."

Blinking, then swallowing once, Thomas reached into his bag without pause, pulling out the book with fidgeting fingers, the leather strap and button keeping its russet and scarlet inlay surface shut. It bulged with drawings, with some of the more precious ones kept in a cover of thin glass he commissioned from a glassmaker in Faubourg Saint-Antoine before the riots closed the factories. She popped off the latch and opened it, peering through its contents. She turned her back and François closed the gap, eyeing the drawings.

Adrienne D'Arracourt looked and dressed like a country girl, with a heart shaped face splotched with freckles. She could have posed on a postage card sent overseas, welcoming foreigners to the beauty of the French countryside – he could've depicted her on one if she so chose. Her powder blue eyes were wide and large, her pupils growing large as a hawthorn when interested or annoyed. The Germanic inflection in her French was strong, sounding almost Belgian, but she sounded pleasant enough, if the crude edges in her voice didn't sharpen her otherwise soft image.

Yet her demanding and disagreeing tone with François proved this was no simple farm girl whose faded cowpox scars along her arms regaled her to a simple life. It was clear she was used to getting what she wanted and had the gold, _livres_ and _lettres des caches_ to pave the way. If she could empty the Palais du Luxembourg in the height of court session and public tourism, surely a task like bribing a hobby artist to create a sketchbook of her enemies was as simple as cutting off the dead ends of her hair.

And _Madamoiselle_ D'Arracourt was not fond of split ends. She had chosen a simpleton and not the artists of the esteemed _Collège des Quatres-Nations, _and should she desire it, she could've put him at the front of the line and ordered the instructors to flagellate themselves if they protested her decision. She would have them at her feet, naked and backs bleeding, spitting out communion and begging forgiveness as if she were Mary Magdalene. Should men like Jacques-Louis David have anything to say about it, she would dump barrels of vermin into his rooms at night so they could tear at his paintings with claws and teeth and ruin all his work.

If one thought Thomas was exaggerating, he wasn't. Adrienne actually promised this when he voiced his doubts.

"David is a brilliant man, but arrogant. He knows his limits, especially when I can pull his carpet of funds right from under his entitled feet,"she had said.

Thomas still wasn't sure if he should say d_e riens _after that statement.

Her patronage, on the other hand, was wholly welcome, adding funds to his constantly depleted bank account and assisting him with issues at the _H__ô__tel des Invalides. _If there was a lack of clean linen, a shipment would arrive the next day. If there was a lack of pots to make stews and soups, she would have some sent in a carriage that evening. If there wasn't enough medicine and the apothecaries refused to treat patients for lack of funds, she would have them dismissed and hire new graduates from the universities to take their place.

One thing she was adamant on above all else was Thomas's artistic skill. Due to necessities, art supplies were crumbs on a constantly emptied plate. Debts, purchases, and a new pantry to store food in case shortages arose burned larger holes in his bank notes. He appreciated the funds she sent him for food and rent – indeed, he always forwarded notes expressing his utmost gratitude and obedience to her goodwill, but Adrienne would keep insisting he fill his sketchbooks, and eventually, the dossiers of her targets started pouring in.

Then came a sketch which put his situation on a rickety carousel, spun it into reverse, and knocked off all the horses.

Initially, there was a pause in her responses, a curious thing given Adrienne wrote to him almost every week and if there was ever a reason for delays in her letters she'd explain why. Once, he hadn't heard from her in a month. That month carried a lingering silence, a reprieve in the newfound attention he'd been getting for his new employer. When he thought his new patronage had ended as quick as it began, a _snap _of the lifeline like the trout escaping from the lure, a messenger intercepted him when he was travelling in the Île de la Cité and plopped a sealed envelope in his palm.

Needless to say, the gift wrapped sketch paper with top-of-the-line charcoal, replete with the silver English fountain pen he still owned, was a sure sign she was completely enthralled with him. She was so impressed with his work, she wrote, that she trusted him above even established court painters to achieve fantastic results. Though he didn't work with paints, which was far more extensive and required much more time to master and learn, his ink drawings struck such a chord with Adrienne he soon found a few of his background sketches in political pamphlets.

People were becoming interested, which in turn would require more of his services, thereby ensuring higher pay. But that gave Adrienne an advantage over the rest: knowing that a mere _fossoyeur_ was at her side like the hound at a huntsman's call was a matter of convenience. Knowing he could complete sketches within 24 hours was a matter of skill. Eventually, impressed with his abilities and assured he would complete whatever job she set him on, she tasked him to accompany Thérése Cabarrus to her social events as her de-facto personal artist.

He never asked what it was about the drawing of his muse aroused her so. Had her uncle, the Prussian Margrave he saw that day with the Crows, filed it away in his thoughts and told his niece to look after the issue? Had the lines and whorls of rich black ink, then drawn with his (now old) English metal pen, flowing across the lines of white aroused her to such a ferocious attention? Had the special coloured ink he added to the eyes struck her as '_That's the one'?_

His muse escaped rationality and explanation, crept across the lines of napkins and wooden tables, begging to be drawn but escaping form and shape. But there it would be, snaking into the coils of his brain from the early hues of dawn to the bleakness of the night, pestering, pestering, _pestering._. The frost that accumulated on the windowpane reminded him of a phantom's breath, blown from the lips of a person he couldn't see or touch. He could not exorcise his thoughts to a priest, nor could a divineness read his palms or look through a glass globe to see where his future lay.

His inks were his confession, his altar of belief. As May turned to June he found he couldn't leash his thoughts which strained at the ropes like a caught rabid fox.

Then the murder of Luc Comtois happened, and he discovered his muse wasn't limited to paper anymore.

* * *

When he first heard the use of 'assassin', it brought him back to the days of La Voisin: though her crimes occurred a half-century before his birth, she was an assassin by right, poisoning people on behalf of others and pocketing coin as a sign of a job well done. The term carried the connotation of a coward who worked in the shadows, disposing people on the whims of another's dislike. Whoever was 'innocent' was up to the scandal. Whoever was guilty was up to the autopsy.

That was the lowercase variant. When he heard the uppercase variant, 'Assassin', Thomas knew it extended well beyond the reach of poisoners and court intrigue.

Then they were known as 'moving shadows': men who melted into the eaves of dawn and dusk, deeds quiet as the whisper of their bodies through the night. There are women among them, but they are seldom: whether it is from a purge or from innate bias Adrienne did not say. But Thomas had already completed her task of drawing all the main Assassins, and he knew that for every ten men there is one woman. If they are a threat, they are no longer, for Adrienne knows who they are and what they can do to people like her.

This is what he heard from Adrienne as she spoke to François, adamant in her victory over him. They spoke in hushed tones, out of Thomas' hearing, but he could grasp words here and there: 'That is a Mentor', 'This is a recruit', 'This one knows where others like her are' and on and on. The _fossoyeur_ learns quickly.

The moving shadows are part of a long lineage, stretching back millennia, to the days of the Pyramids and maybe earlier – but the sands of Egypt was where they were born formally, like sand fleas emerging from the hide of a camel. During the Third Crusade they were pushed back, fighting a bitter war with the Crusaders and the Templar Knights. The Templars, the _fossoyeur_ hears, are also from a long lineage, birthed from a cult much like the former. But the Knights reformed it, dedicating their lives around the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail, ancient Biblical stories he believed were happy relics of the Holy Land.

No, Adrienne confesses, they are not: the Templars themselves were split into two factions before their Great Purge, with half of their members fleeing across Europe and possibly to the New World by way of the Norse route. Those who remained were of course burned for heresy, but those who retained knowledge of the scattering of their members were interrogated by the Assassins for what they knew. Their refusal to relinquish information on the lost Grail and sacred relics was met with harsh retribution. The Assassins did not forget the siege on their original castle, their homelands. In so driving a wedge with the Templars, they strengthened their ranks much the same way the Templars strengthened them when they drove them to the edges of society's mind.

The hunt for said relics continues, but what Thomas heard repeated like a hushed incantation is the term 'displaced'. It, too, was not the lowercase variant, but uppercase. The Displaced, whether they are a wandering people like the Gypsies or the Jews, or some other nefarious force, could not be explained yet.

Thomas sat like a rejected student in an upholstered chair, the red fabric still clean with silver inlay gleaming crisp in the afternoon light. A stuffed peacock stood on the table next to him, its magnificent plumage tucked under its body like a folded Oriental fan. He eyed the bird, wondering if he'll be stuffed in the future and put on display, a relic of the past for the future to prod at. There is a reason why Adrienne and her fellow Crow are allowing him to be in the same room as they speak about sensitive topics: she intended to use him as a bargaining ploy, a way for her to ensure she meant every word and how he will not go running to the Assassins if his situation deteriorates. She was reminding him that she alone is giving him money, food and security, not a group of hidden shadows who bribe street urchins and bakers to spy for them.

From his sketches, he now knows he's been watching at least one Assassin in the Bastille: Pierre Bellec. Imprisoned based on a _lettre de cache_ – who sent it, or why de Launay approved it, could be the result of an expert forgery. Thinking about it sent a chill up his spine: he has spoken to the man, offered him distilled beer from a German distiller when he was on good behaviour. _Monsieur_ Bellec offered nothing out of the ordinary, but Thomas recollects the days when Bellec began to eye him differently: the minute _la sorcière _entered the prison.

There the older man's eyes narrowed, the wrinkles under his eyes seemingly disappearing with his newfound focus. His jaw tightened, but irritation wasn't the cause. A few days after l_a sorcière _was locked in the calottes, Bellec called out to him before he was about to leave. When Thomas approached the bars of his cell, Bellec lowered his voice, speaking conspiratorially as if trading secrets at the gaming table.

"That girl of yours...doesn't happen to have green eyes, does she?"

Thomas raised an eyebrow. "Peculiar thing to ask."

"I'll take that as a 'yes'." Bellec nodded, taking a minute to look behind him. His younger, half-Austrian companion was too busy fumbling with his watch, trying to get the minute hand to obey for the umpteenth time. Despite the hushed tones between them, it was obvious the young man was listening in, using his broken watch as an excuse. If Bellec disliked an eavesdropper, he gave no indication of it – or he thought the half-Austrian was better off guessing.

"You know how to get easy answers, don't you?"

Bellec snorted. "You're ex-military. I could tell right by the way you don't give a damn about the others. No room for nonsense and loose lips. No room for idiots, that's for sure."

Thomas nodded, once. "I appreciate the compliment."

"Then you'll appreciate my need for information," Bellec continued. He fixed Thomas with a narrowed gaze. "She doesn't just have green eyes, she has black hair. Tall, bit on the frosty side. Half-Russian. Lived in an apartment near the Sorbonne. Pretty expensive for a woman with no identity."

There Thomas' eyebrows crawled to his hairline like a pair of curled caterpillars. "Where did you learn this? De Launay told me nothing -

"No, he wouldn't, because he doesn't know," Bellec interrupted. The _lettre de cache_ was given to him the night before she got here. I want to know who wrote it." The prisoner – _Assassin,_ Thomas had to remind himself now – eyed him with a scrutinizing glare, as if to say, 'You'll give me what I want and I'll hear no ifs, ands, or buts'. "I need that letter by tomorrow."

"What for? You know de Launay is not going to let me pluck it off his desk like a missive," Thomas protested. "Plus, don't you think as a prisoner you're demanding more than you're allotted? I can give you your letters and give you things to write them. I cannot give you the letters from _le gouverner. _It'd be the stocks for me, and the moat for you."

He was given a sardonic smile, a feature which appeared natural on his weathered face. He expected the response. He didn't care. "I know you're creative. Find me the letter, and I'll find a way where we can speak more freely about our..._situation."_

"'Our' situation?"

"_Oui. _You'll hear from me in a few days, but until then...tell that girl not to wear white when she's _trying _to sneak around. Would've told her myself, but she's fast. Got to give her that." Bellec shrugged. "Off you go, then."

To know that man is an Assassin offers Thomas a new perspective on the world around him. Before, he merely regarded him as a career criminal, but one who looked too good to be a miscreant eating disgusting foodstuffs from the market stalls outside of the _Rue de la Surintendance. _He was an expert fencer, knew hand-to-hand combat, and was aware of all the goings-on in the country. He was not illiterate; he knew his poets, playwrights and philosophers though he didn't much care for Voltaire or Edmund Burke. Despite a weathered face from middle age he didn't appear to be suffering from his age like Thomas was, sore back and insomnia all. Simply put, the man was too fit to be a prisoner in the Bastille; out of place, like a stuffed peacock in an empty room in the Palais du Luxembourg.

The truth about what he is and what his lineage brings made a little more sense, albeit it wasn't a truth Thomas could fully comprehend yet. He knows what 'Assassins' are; what they _do_ is far more complex. Their feud with the Templars seems to be the clichéd 'battle for the ages', but it felt strange being a Samaritan throughout it all. He couldn't hold the sword or preach the message.

It'd been days, _weeks _since he spoke to Bellec. What would he think now that he was speaking to their mortal enemies? Adrienne openly stated she was not a Templar, but a Knight Hospitaller – a distant ally of the Templars but an order which operated on its own rules. François was one, for he had asked Adrienne whether she was loyal to the 'French Rite' and not the 'Prussian Rite'...which would mean by extension her uncle was a Templar. Where did he stand in their Order?

It was overwhelming. It felt like he is being subjected to swallow molten lead for a grave crime, and said crime was him bearing witness to a web he wants to disentangle himself from before the spider can sink her fangs in him. It was too late, though, for Adrienne had already made her decision: Thomas is her pedestrian spy in a cosmopolitan city. The Assassins would watch him, of course they would, but they would think little of him. What they want is information on the 'Displaced', and that is a task Adrienne has made strides on.

"_Regardez ici (Look here). _All of the Assassins, exposed and threadbare, like I was announcing a fashion and gossip magazine," she said. A strong note of smugness slithered past her lips. "Do you doubt my loyalties now?"

François inclined his head. Her tone is akin to irritating dust, but he does not wrinkle his nose to breathe it in. "_Le fossoyeur _has the portrait. This is what she looks like?"

"Down to the last strand."

"But you've never seen her yourself." François' voice is like the _snap _of leather, well oiled and quick across skin. "How can you know the portrait is accurate?"

" I - " Adrienne sputtered, clearly taken aback. She has been put in her place, she did not expect it, and she _does not like it._. "I – _He _has seen her!" Adrienne pointed at Thomas, drawing his attention away from the stuffed peacock and into the target she makes of him with her finger. "Did you not tell me you wanted these drawings?!"

Ignoring her indignant cries, François-Thomas Germain fixates the lowly gravedigger with a soul-piercing stare. The blue and the brown serve as the nails which will be hammered into his wrists. There is no going back, if he ever had the choice to go back. "Thomas, is it?"

A subtle nod, as if disturbing the dust motes floating around the curtains was a crime too grave to commit. Germain beckons him closer with a sleight of hand, pulling out a silver pin from his sleeve. The engraving at the top has a peculiar cut: it is done in the shape of a cat, the tail curling around the base where an emerald is set. He holds the tip between his fingers.

"I considered giving this to Marie Levesque, but since she attends Mass having a black cat on her person would be regarded as an ill omen," Germain said. "Adrienne never mentioned this, but looking at your drawings I suspect this is a talent which keeps you up at night. A muse which dominates all corners of your mind, inhibiting all other forms of human function. You do not drink, you do not eat – these things are trivial. The _creation_ comes first."

Without asking – and Thomas suspects Germain didn't _need_ to ask – Adrienne opened the page where a full-page drawing of his muse is set. Behind the thin glass case lies a wave of black hair parted over a shoulder, falling to the subject's waist in a midnight plume. A white nightgown reveals the other shoulder, the sternum prominent but no longer sharp against unblemished skin. Fine, tapered fingers crossed over a lap hold a knife of a particular shape and build: too thick to be a stiletto, but not carved enough to be a Syrian dagger. The blade curled into a muscular thigh, and while it is held in a comfortable grip, it is pressed into the skin. No blood is drawn, but it could with just a twinge of added pressure.

The lips have the hint of a smile, but the serious set of the face reveals it is a guarded one. It belonged to one who does not smile often, who views showing happiness as abhorrent; a sign of weakness. There is a slight curve at the edge, almost a smirk, almost a flirtatious invitation. So much was revealed in that little slip.

The only colour Thomas added to the drawing was for his muse's eyes: a sharp emerald green, cat-like in mischievousness and knowledge. Deceit swirled the centres, with the storm he wanted to capture not as vivid as he wanted it to be. Looking at it, it felt like he was being judged. By rights he should be, given the world he was stepping foot in. He started off on the beach, and emerged in the depths of the abyss.

And there, on a left hand, was a diamond ring in a snowflake cut.

"Most men don't believe in coincidences," Germain began, drawing Thomas away from the artwork, "but I'm one who believes that coincidences aren't _random._ Consider this: we have never met before today, but we both desired the same person. It was a plague on our minds and we could not burn it out." He tilted the pin towards him. "You saw a woman, I saw a black cat. What a coincidence that a woman described as having features like a black cat was seen wandering the Sorbonne before she burned a playwright alive." His lips twisted in a smirk. "We used to burn witches on a pyre, yet here is one burning a man of God."

"She is the only one we know of who belongs to the 'displaced'. The last one I was following drowned himself in the Seine," Adrienne said, hoping to turn the conversation back to her.

Germain clucked his tongue. "Unfortunate. But that one wasn't too interested in self-preservation, was he? He'd cry for his mother had an Assassin novice got to him."

"She said it wasn't her fault."

Germain raised an eyebrow. Adrienne tightened her jaw. Ignoring their looks, Thomas continued, "He self-immolated. She didn't throw the fire on him, he did it to himself. He said he panicked when he saw her, and she didn't know why." He looked between them, hoping one of them would be convinced. "I don't understand why she's important..."

"She's in the Bastille. I would rather her stay there until I can find the means to get her out," Germain answered. "Adrienne is working on that endeavour. But there is an already an Assassin in the same premise as her, and I suspect if he wanted to break out of the fortress, he would take her with him. I wish to avoid that scenario."

"Did you know she already caused a scene before her arrest? One of my birds told me she got into a verbal spat with some members of the Third Estate. At a play one of them made a comment about female inferiority, and _la sorcière _couldn't resist starting a verbal – and physical! - fight. Apparently, the Comte de Mirabeau heard the whole thing and she tried to start a fight with him as well," Adrienne said. She eyed Thomas. "Clearly, you can see how important this issue is to us. The Assassins suspect she's worth something. We want to ascertain this value first."

"_Mirabeau _knows about her. It is clear he has been sending letters to Pierre Bellec in prison. The letters he sends will be encoded – but there is a way we can find out which ones were sent from the hideout."

"Patrice will deal with it," Adrienne said, waving a dismissive hand. "Now, I think you know why you were allowed to hear our conversation and our secrets, Thomas?"

He stared at her in disbelief. She was asking him this, _now, _when she already made that assumption beforehand?

"...This is leverage. Secrets are safer. You wouldn't think an impoverished old military man would run his mouth, would you?"

Adrienne smiled. It softened her hard jaw, and her freckles bunch around the curve of her cheeks. She knew he was bought and sold. "_Exactement. _I would trust no one else."

"Here," Germain held out the pin to him, inviting him to take it. "I am a silversmith by trade. One artist's gift to another." He placed it in Thomas' open palm. The emerald glows around the cat's swirling tail. "Oh, one more thing," Germain added, "don't touch the tip of the pin. It's only for..._unfortunates _to touch."

"I think our meeting is adjourned," Adrienne announced, moving to collect her black cloak off the couch. As she fastened it under her chin, she asked, "Anything else?"

"_Attente!" _

It comes out louder than he intended, causing Adrienne's hands to freeze at her throat. For once, her powder-blue eyes are widened in surprise rather than anger. Germain, too, pauses. "What is it?"

Thomas licks his lips. They feel dry, cracked and immovable. He pushes his tongue past them in defiance. "She said...she said she knew you. Asked me about your name." He watched her for a reaction. "She said she worked for you...so how could you not have known who she was?"

Well, as it turns out, Adrienne D'Arracourt did _not _know Marceline _l__a sorcière. _Prior to that day, Adrienne only knew her as a drawing, a subject locked in a cell she could monitor. Prior to that day, D'Arracourt was a name and a set of initials, and François-Thomas Germain was a silversmith.

On this particular June day, Thomas learned two very important things: _Madamoiselle _D'Arracourt was a wealthy woman, a Knight Hospitaller, and all-knowing canary on the Grand Master of the French Rite of the Templar Order's shoulder.

He also learned _l__a sorcière _was a skilled liar, and had been since she arrived in Paris.

Yes, about that cognac...


End file.
